I used to check the weather on my phone about 100 times a day. I was obsessed with it. I could tell you the five day forecast according to iPhone weather by heart. I also knew the weather in Bradley Beach, Okemos, Glen Ellyn, Winter Springs, Miami, Cancun and any city that Charlie had just traveled to or was about to travel to (he would use my phone to check their weather and then leave it on there). I don't know when that stopped, but it did. Maybe when I became too busy to care about what the weather was, or maybe it was after 30 days of 100 degrees and I knew it was just going to be hot, or maybe because I get jealous of seeing how everybody else's weather was so much nicer than ours.
Whatever the reason, I never know what the weather is going to be now. So, I was pleasantly surprised when it started to rain on Monday evening. We've had a very hot summer and, as usual, have had very little rain this year. All the plants are hunched over and the grass is yellow, so a little rain is always needed. When I was a kid I never understood why my parents wanted it to rain. Rain isn't fun, why would you be happy that it's raining? Now that I'm older and pay the water bill and see how much money goes into watering the lawn, I get it. So a little rain on Tuesday was nice. It brought the temperature down and wasn't too menacing.
Today was a different story. It was torrential, like a monsoon or...a hurricane. That's right, apparently since I don't pay attention to the weather anymore I was unaware, a tropical storm with the potential of being a hurricane moved into the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend. Hermine. You wouldn't think something like that wouldn't impact the Dallas area, but it sure does.
Unfortunately for me, Wednesday is my busiest day with the kids, or at least the girls, where we are driving from activity to activity. I hate putting them in rain coats, because then they get all hot and sweaty in the car and their car seat gets all wet, and we just don't do boots. I buy them with good intentions, or at least I used to, but we never wear them. I saw more women wearing calf-high rain boots today than I have ever seen, but that's probably because they never have an excuse to wear them and today the water was so high there was definitely a need. So I took the girls to swimming this morning, and got soaked putting them in the car, soaked getting them out of the car, and soaked getting them back into the car when it was over. It's not that big of a deal because I have to get in the pool with Amanda so I'm not wearing my best clothes to swimming (usually I don't even shower that morning since I'm just going to get covered with chlorine), but it's annoying because then you are cold and wet in the car. Luckily the kids didn't get that wet so Sarah didn't complain too much. Don't get me wrong, she complained. She's always complaining about something because she's four. She just didn't complain as much as she could have. Luckily it was raining a little less by the time we went to Sarah's therapy and had stopped by the time we needed to pick Andy up from school.
Why, do you ask, do I get wet putting them into the car? That's because we don't park in our garage. That would be a great idea, but our garage has too much shit in it. Sorry for the profanity, but that really is the best description. When we moved into this house four years ago we put a bunch of stuff in the garage because we didn't want to put it in the attic only to never be touched again. We wanted to weed through the junk and get rid of it and then put only the things we really needed into the attic. Four years later, all that stuff is still there along with a bunch of other things. There is barely room to walk in the garage, let alone park the car in there. Therefore, when it rains, we get wet.
I'm not exactly sure why, but the drainage system is not idea here. I guess it works most of the time, but every time we have a really big rain it fails miserably. We have enormous drains in the streets, much bigger than the tiny grated drains we had where I grew up, and they kind of slant down to catch everything. They are not covered and are big enough for small children to climb into. Seriously, if Sarah really wanted to go into one of the drains she would fit. They aren't that close together, so when it does rain the water rushes down the street like a flash flood until it finally hits one of the drains. When we have rain like today, things flood. On the way home from swimming we had to go a different direction because the road had closed in the hour since I had come. Once we found a new way home I saw cars on the side of the road, one poor man changing a tire in the pouring rain, and a guy who's car had stalled after going through a very large puddle. One car even had water coming out of it's tail pipe, and I'm pretty sure that is not supposed to happen.
This afternoon I took the back way to get to Sarah's therapy. The most direct route always takes way too long and I finally figured out that the back roads may seem longer mileage wise, but take half the time. As we were driving I saw all these people on the side of the road looking over a bridge. What was going on? Flooding. A river that barely does anything and probably wasn't even there two days ago was raging and the large field next to it was completely filled with water. The field across the street that was usually filled with cows and horses was covered with water too. It wasn't even still water, it was definitely moving. Where I do not know. The middle school just down the street from that had to evacuate 879 students to the high school gym because it was flooded. Towards the end of the day we stopped by the park that the river flows next to and it was also under at least three feet of water. We're not talking about a little park, the playground has to be at least 200 yards from that river. Unbelievable.
Tomorrow and Friday we are supposed to get some reprieve from the rain, but the three days after that we are expecting thunderstorms again. As long as our pool doesn't overflow and flood our house, I think I can handle it. We'll have to be pretty creative with what we do with the kids this weekend or everybody is going to go stir crazy. Maybe they can pack some sand bags.
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