get the cats and board the ark

This is some crazy rain. It’s like end-of-days kind of crazy. It’s rained hard nonstop for about 36 hours now, maybe more. Actually it’s let up a bit now, it’s maybe just coming down at a normal-rain rate.

Ah, I spoke too soon. The minute I got that last sentence typed in, it started deluge-ing again. Crazy. Seems like it’s making up for all the rain that we didn’t get last year — we were down by more than half of the usual amount, which as you may have guessed, is not all that much to begin with in Texas.

Yesterday I tried to go up to Frisco to the IKEA store to look for a desk for my office, and halfway there had to turn around and come home because the car had sprung a leak and water started coming in through the sunroof. I knew if I parked it at the IKEA in the downpour for a couple of hours, it’d be a swimming pool on the inside. As it was, I was pretty soaked when I got home. We opened the doors and pointed an industrial fan at the upholstery for a couple of hours last night.

We went to brunch this morning (driving in the rain doesn’t seem to make the car leak as much as standing still in the rain) and parked under the covered parking at Northpark Mall, then walked across the street to Blue Mesa to meet Brittney and Kirk and Amy. When we were finished, it was raining so hard you could barely see halfway across the parking lot. Doc and I went into Barnes & Noble for about 30 minutes to wait it out, but it never let up. By the time we got back across the street to our car we were completely soaked through from the waist down.

It took us forever to get home due to flooded streets and people going 5 miles per hour. We came home on Walnut Hill because we thought Northwest Highway would probably be shut down on the creek floodplain — it was almost to the road on our way to brunch.

The creek in back of our house, while not at the top, is the highest I’ve ever seen it. I don’t think we’re in any danger since it has a good 6-8 feet left to rise before it would top the banks. On the other side of Walnut Hill it’s eaten away a large chunk of the bank and I wouldn’t be surprised if several of these trees go down too.

Our neighbors across the street are the lucky recipients of all the rain that has been pooling up in the shopping center behind them. I guess the drains in the parking lot got full because it pooled at the back of the shopping center (we went splashing back there to see how deep it was and the water was nearly up to our knees) and came under the brick separator wall into their backyard, through their courtyard (and probably house too) and is now pouring through their front gate out into the front yard and down into the street. It looks like someone turned on several fire hydrants and is just letting them run out the front gate.