Today has been INSANE. It snowed several inches over the weekend, I'm guessing about 6-8 inches here at our place. But then (this is the bigger story) today it's been raining so hard and so much that almost all traces of snow have been washed away. I heard that it rained 6 inches today! It was the 2nd most rainfall in a day on record! To put it into perspective, we get about 36 inches in a year! So for those of you that don't live around here, you can imagine that that much rain in one day had to do some damage. I'm going to talk about what I've seen and experienced, but if you want to know a more widespread scope of things around here, here's an article my mother-in-law pointed out in an email.

So this morning I went out to the van to get it warmed up before taking Adrienne to school and this is what greeted me in the shop where the van was parked:

From the drivers side I couldn't tell if the whole shop was flooded and we have some (a lot) carpet matting laying on the floor of the shop on the other side of the van, but luckily the flooding didn't go that far. So we haven't had any damage to any of our property because of this massive rainfall, but it was a close call - my dad dug a trench around a window that leads into the basement and avoided it all spilling over into the basement (where all our carpet is stored). Also it's pretty lucky we just finished with the siding or we'd have more wetness inside the house to deal with.

So when I left to take her the first sign that this rainfall was pretty heavy was the ditch at the bottom of our driveway was overflowing and water was running across our driveway:

This is our neighbor's driveway:

These pictures were taken after I'd already done my errands while Adrienne was at school. So I didn't have my camera with me for the most extreme thing that I experienced. I had taken Edward to my parents house, and then to do an errand up in Poulsbo - on the way back I took the Newberry Hill exit (I know people that don't live here don't have a clue about what I'm talking about - sorry), at the bottom of the exit there was water all across the roadway. This wasn't the first time I'd encountered water across the roadway in the course of the day and I watched a car drive through before me, so assumed that me being in a van it would be okay for me to go through as well...well as I was driving down into the water (very slowly) I stopped and opened the door to check how high the water was...it was just inches from the level of the floor, and I was just barely entering the water - there was probably about 30 feet left to drive through and I could tell it would only be getting deeper. The thing that really made me decide not to go was watching branches float along in front of me and then...a railroad tie (There's actually a railroad track up the hill from the exit, Mike saw more railroad ties later tonight, so I wonder how bad the damage is to the tracks)...so I wasn't about to drive through that water not knowing how deep it was or what kind of debris could be in it. But by now I had to wait for all the cars that were piling up behind me to back up onto the freeway, and as I was sitting there for the 15 minutes or so I could actually see the water rising. It was pretty freaky. So after I got back on the freeway and took my thawing frozen food home I went to pick up Edward. This is what it looked like at the bottom of El Dorado hill, you can see the mud and rocks across the road:

By the time I came back from picking up Edward the road to the left of the picture above was closed. Everything seemed to progress so quickly that I was getting worried that the bus would have trouble dropping off Adrienne or that Mike might not be able to make it home later that day. When I got home I was waiting at the bottom of our driveway where the bus now drops off Adrienne when I got a call on my cell from her teacher that the bus hadn't even arrived yet (then Adrienne's stop is 1/2 hour into her route). So she suggested that I come to get her. I wasn't thrilled with the idea since I'd have to bring Edward and Colette in with me in the torrential downpour and Edward was hungry after 4 hours since his last meal, but at that point I wanted all of us safe at home, plus there was no clue when the bus would actually get here. What I didn't know was that the whole school was being let out early (the whole district actually) and so the parking situation at the school was horrendous. It took about 15 minutes for me to get a parking "spot". Then, and this has to be the most annoying thing of the day, as I'm loaded up with Edward and Colette and a very large umbrella and preparing to walking into inches of water and get soaked up to my ankles (fun stuff) a car pulls forward and cuts me off. The traffic in the parking lot is still backed up and that car wasn't going more than a couple feet before stopping again for who knows how long (and sitting in a dry car I might add). I didn't hide my annoyance and I believe I rolled my eyes and scowled to myself. The driver must have noticed because he/she jerked to a stop and I hastily crossed in front of them. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful except for being sick (body aches) and dropping the lasagna on the floor that was supposed to be our dinner. Mike got home okay, school is canceled for tomorrow.

So here are the rest of the pictures I took - they're on the way to and from my parents'. They don't look quite as impressive now that I just saw an email my mother-in-law sent out that were on the news websites. I'll put those in at the bottom.

Here are some of the pictures from the email my mother-in-law sent out. They're all from places not too far from here.Oh, here's one last picture, of the trees in our backyard yesterday...thought it looked pretty:

All right well I'm being rushed to finish this up (it's now 10:07...three hours after I started this), Mike needs to use the computer.