Wet Weather Woes

It's been an interesting few days. Friday morning was gray and cloudy, with a promise of storms developing, but it wasn't raining yet. I went to the airport, 43 miles away, to pick up Susan just after noon, and on the way home it was kind of spitting a little rain. By late afternoon there was quite a bit of thunderstorm activity, and we waited it out before making a Sam's Club and Wal-Mart run to buy stuff for Robyn's recital on Saturday (she wanted to have a little reception afterward). The storms seemed to have cleared up, so everything looked okay. Saturday morning it was gray and cloudy again. I hadn't really paid attention to the forecast; rain is definitely inconvenient, but it can be dealt with. When the recording engineer that Robyn hired to record the recital called and asked if we were still planning to have the recital, I should have realized that this was not an ordinary rain event. It turns out that the kind of rain that we got on Saturday was really extreme. Robyn had come down our direction, away from UH where the recital would be held, to get her hair done, so she was over by Baybrook Mall for a noon appointment. The rain started to fall after noon in our end of town. At 2:00 we looked outside and saw BLACKNESS. It was as dark as nighttime. It started pouring down rain like nobody's business. Susan and I were sitting at the kitchen table playing Upwords to pass the time until we had to leave at 3:30 for the recital. At 2:30, Ben came out from the bedroom and asked me where the towels were, which means that water was coming in the master bathroom. At that point, I figured I'd better find out where Robyn was, so I called her and discovered that she was sitting in her car in the parking lot of the salon and watching traffic sitting still on the street. Having checked the weather radar on the internet and seeing lots of red and yellow cells on top of us and on their way from the southwest, I advised her to start calling people and cancel the recital. Truth is, there was no way that she was going to be able to get to UH with roads flooding all over town, and we could not have gotten past the intersection on our street, as the water was up over the curb and covering the sidewalks. What a disappointment! (An aside--Ben had to go outside in the downpour to move mulch away from the drainage pipe that was covered up--the one that drains water away from the bathroom where it was coming in--so he got an extra soaking that day!) We started making calls to tell people not to feel bad about not coming to hear it. And we started eating the cookies that I had made for the reception, since the freezer was *way too full* to put them back in! After many calls back and forth and several trips outside to check out the flooding on our street, we finally gave Robyn the go-ahead to start home to our house around 4:30, and she managed to get here safely. The rain finally let up, but it was a real mess. We invited Tim to come down and go to dinner with us, but he looked outside his place and said that traffic on the freeway was really clogged, so he figured it would be easier to stay home and dry.

Sunday morning, it was still cloudy. We did see a patch of blue sky on the way to church, but at least it wasn't raining. The clouds finally did clear off and things began drying out. It looks like the recital will be rescheduled for next Sunday afternoon, and it will be in the beautiful chapel of our church, since all of the performance venues at UH are completely booked for the remainder of the semester. So I'm hoping we can make arrangements for Susan to stay over an extra day or two, since she came all this way to hear the recital (she was planning to leave on Saturday). Besides, I may need her help to bake more cookies!