Flood Warning, Canadian County

I am in Fly Creek NY with my daughter who is due to bear her first child any day now. We know with 70% certainty, thanks to modern ultrasound, that it's a girl. Her name will be Mira. Don't know what name may be on standby if Mira happens to fall into that 30% category and emerge with a stem, but should that happen, he'll only have to wear pink for about the first year or so.

While I'm out of pocket my Dear Husband Steve stayed in Oklahoma to hold the fort down in my absence, and Holy Cow, he has his work cut out for him today - I just received this post from him via Facebook: 

     

     "Raining like a heifer pissing on a flat rock here. The BX (Broadway Extension) and Turner Turnpike are CLOSED. TV telling everybody to stay put. Mike DiGacomo (street super, OKC) has his barricades and storm sewer covers floating away. The 10" tree log path has floated past the sweetbush....pans and bowls all over the trailer. Upstairs bedroom in the house tarped and running into 5 gal buckets. must empty every 5 minutes. Muffin inside and pissed off. Cookie? well, good stealth to you! No cell phone signal, but we got internet antenna. Thunder in the distance (NW of Mustang) but none locally. leak in the studio under the East wall and door threshold. bear gonow.......an intense event."

KFOR weather has an interactive radar where you can enter an address and pinpoint your actual location. It keeps looking like the rain is going to let up, but it just keeps raining, and heavily.  Reminds me of a weather joke we have in Oklahoma - "Last time it rained forty days and forty nights, they got a trace in Guymon." Yeah, Mustang is nowhere near Guymon.

Both cats have wanted to be nowhere but outside since early Spring but Muffin ran inside this morning to escape another block-headed yellow lab who came around barking at Steve. It was a different dog from the one I described in my "Not All Who Wander" blog entry last month because today's dog was uncut, as compared to the old neutered male of previous mention.  So Muffin is inside, where he does not like to be, but which he finds less distasteful than going out in the pouring rain. Cats are so funny.  Cookie can usually find a discreet place to hole up and usually stays quite dry, thank you very much, but I bet she's wet today! I hope she's okay. 

The tree log path Steve mentions - we had done some clearing and reserved a couple of tree trunks for Truth, Beauty and Goodness projects. These trunks are actually 10 to 16 inches across, and we had cut one of them into 2 to 3 inch slabs to use as stepping stones in paths where the grass hasn't taken hold yet. One set of steps was about 12 to 20 feet from the sweetbush, the next one was about 50 to 75 feet from it, and the other path about 100+ feet from the sweetbush, so any one of those would be a significant washout!

Speaking of turnpikes being closed, before I left, I promised without fail that I would keep an eye ahead on the weather when I'm traveling, and if it looked very bad, I would hold my position rather than risk harm due to a weather disaster. This situation reaffirms that determination. That interactive map on KFOR will show current weather radar for any address you plug into it, so that promises to be an extremely handy tool in addition to local forecasts along the way.

Meanwhile, here in Fly Creek, it's only overcast. Cool central NY summer day. Misty's dog, Potato, rests at my feet, while we wait for labor to begin.

Stay dry and safe, everyone!