RUNNING WATER

Hey you. I have been posting every day, have you noticed? Also, I went back and popped some more pictures in.

My computer is working fabulously now. It is virus protected, virus scanned, cleaned out and up, has a fancy new hard drive (where my Itunes library is going to go live soon) and I was able to download things off my camera. Next up is connecting the router for my laptop, but I put that on tomorrow's schedule.

Today is Wednesday and the P's will be awaiting me when I get home from work today. We have spaghetti and salad and banana pudding to eat. A new Animal Baby magazine to look at. And it's gorgeous outside today, so we may all go for a short walk if we can sneak out of the house without Snoopy. Two babies and a dog is a might much for one Grammy to handle. They tend to move in three separate directions.

Papa headed to the country for two days to take care of some business there. He has bought the new kitchen cabinets for our latest rehab project on the property across the road and since it wasn't raining, figured today was a good time to take them out to the house. He has also been searching for another old car to rehab so tomorrow he is headed to KC to look at one he's found in a farmer's barn. I cringe to think about this. Another story for another time.

Saturday before I fled the country in advance of a forecasted blizzard, I happened to walk toward the barn with Snoopy and noticed we had a little river. We have what is called a "wet weather" creek behind the house and this is the second time in 9 years that I've seen water in this creek.

This is where the "creek" begins...what one would call the head of the river! HAHA.






These pictures are looking down the creek (notice our "bridge") to cross the river.





We even had a little waterfall.



Like I mentioned before this is the second time that I've seen water in this "wet weather" creek. The first time was about 7 years ago. I was home alone with Sydney (my elderly dog that resides in doggy heaven now) and we were in the middle of some pretty bad storms. Since we are so far out from town, we don't hear tornado sirens. When the wind blows, the satellite goes down and our radio reception is crappy all the time inside the house. So when we have a bad storm, we were pretty uninformed (not any more though, Papa has since purchased a weather radio that has been sitting in it's box on the kitchen table for several months now!). But it's there waiting for the next storm to hit.

My telephone worked, however. DD, who was working in Illinois at the time, was calling me every few minutes to give me another weather warning "Union is purple on the weather map"---worse than green, yellow or red apparently and there had been tornados sighted in the area.

This particular storm started with wind and rain and I happened to be in the bathroom when the hail hit. Hit indeed...at first I thought a large tree had fallen on the roof it was so loud, but the noise became constant. I looked outside and saw not marble-sized hail or golf ball-sized hail but baseball-sized hail and since I figured Papa wouldn't believe this, I ran out to the edge of the covered porch and grabbed a piece and put it in the freezer for show and tell later. Come to find out later, this large hail busted out the window in Papa's truck that was sitting in the driveway. BIG HAIL.

So we're being assaulted by this large hail, wind, and rain and DD's telephone calls. She finally unnerved me when she said we needed to get to shelter fast. We have a storm cellar underneath our storage shed in the backyard but this meant going outside in the storm and around the back of the house and climbing down a series of steps to the cellar's door. (In the pictures above, the storm cellar is around the bend from the bridge that crosses this "creek".)

Since it was still hailing, I grabbed a heavy quilt to put over my head to prevent me from getting knocked unconscious by the baseball-sized hail and one of the neighbors finding me laying out in the yard later on. I put Sydney on her leash, another thing out of the ordinary, but I didn't want her to get spooked and run off from me in the storm. Then out of the door we went. Syd was pretty distressed that I was dragging her out in this mess and I was literally dragging her too.

We left the cover of the porch, went around the corner of house and got to the steps going down to the storm cellar. There was our "wet weather" creek that had actually turned in a roaring river and was rising pretty fast. It had already risen about half-way up the door to the storm cellar.

Syd and I looked at each other and made out way back to the safety of the house. I shut all the windows and closed all the drapes and curtains and started to make dinner, trying to ignore the chaos in nature that was occurring outside. DD called and asked why I wasn't in shelter and I said our shelter was about flooded and I chose to take my chances with a tornado rather than drown in my storm cellar. I told her I was making dinner and if I should be blown away, well then it was meant to be.

We all survived that night (except the windshield of the truck) and in all the years since, I have never seen ANY water in this creek until this past Saturday. It sure wasn't the roaring river it had been on that night many years ago, this time it was a calm, quiet little babbling brook. Photogenic and relaxing. Almost like one of those fountains you can now buy for the inside of your house that run on electricity.

Until next time.....Grammy