When I left the office at about 2:30 pm on Monday, a co-worker said "You might want to wait out the rain..." It wasn't coming down too hard, and I had had enough of working on a holiday. "I'm going!" I yelped as I schlept out the door into rambunctious sprinkles.
And it wasn't too bad, at least until I hit the beginning of Burnet Road north. The gurgle and growl of the storm was up north at that point, boiling in the upper reaches of the Shoal Creek catchment. And thee rain was coming down. Burnet Road was reduced to two lanes because there was so much water coming down the street (later it was closed due to flooding, the first time I've ever heard of that happening .
When I got to the house, there was an six-foot wide river coming out of the neighbor's yard and into ours. By this time, we had a pretty good sand bar of black gravel at the end of the drive (and a loss of almost all the mulch in the median between our yards.
After the storm, which pelted us with 5.5 inches in 3 hours, we enjoyed a long sky of glorious mammatus clouds. The clouds lingered through sunset as the storm slowly marched eastward, busting dams, closing highways, and flooding homes.
According to our weather station, we've been blessed with 19.7 inches of rain over the last month, 8 inches of it over Memorial Day weekend. Yikes! That's a lot of rain! In a normal year Austin gets 33 inches. Yikety yike yikes!
On the bright said, our garden and yard is looking great. And more rain is predicted for this afternoon...
