pictoral representation of recent alarming days

Since actually writing a real entry seems to be beyond me. I had one entry for January. Surely that’s an all-time low. I’m too lethargic to actually check, though.

Our weather has been completely insane. Week before last it was mostly in the teens. A little snow, but horrifically cold. It didn’t get above freezing until Monday.  When it went from 20 degrees to 55 degrees in something like an hour and a half. Then Tuesday it was REALLY warm… up in the 60s!! Practically summer weather! At least spring weather! Of course, being January, that certainly wasn’t going to last. Wednesday it was still warm but not quite so balmy. And it started raining. And it rained and it rained and it rained. And it poured and Aggravation Receptionist left work early because her road actually is prone to flooding and Mr. Organized left early because he moonlights at H&R Block during tax season and Miss Artsy didn’t come in at all (another story for another day- supposedly sick but I’m thinking not) and our boss left early to pick up his kid because they let out school because it was flooding all over the place… so I was the only one at work till five and we were all laughing at how floods don’t bother ME… I’d be late the next day if it snowed (as forecast) but floods?? No problem! I’m way up on a ridge!

I stayed till five and then like the idiot I so often am, I decided to go to the grocery store before going  home. For beer and cat food. Neither of which I needed desperately enough to risk my life over, but honestly I did not realize how dire the situation actually WAS out there, even though Facebook was posting some pretty dire updates. But I’m up on a ridge, and I don’t have to deal with any rivers! And we do not live in what is ordinarily a flood zone.We’re in the mountains, for fuck sake.

So off to Harris Teeter I went.

I figured the mall would flood. The mall actually IS in a flood plain. There is a little creek that runs through town and past campus and by the mall and the mall is so prone to flooding at the slightest provocation that no local would EVER park their car in the front lot near the creek if there’s a cloud in the sky.

Because this is what happens.

But I didn’t park in the mall. I certainly know better that THAT.

Driving through the main intersection in town is not usually a problem, though. Unless you’ve had eleventy million inches of rain fall in an hour. Then it becomes a problem. A big problem, and all the side roads get blocked off and you can’t bypass the intersection and you’re having to just go on and drive THROUGH it with everyone else.

I didn’t take this. I was much too busy panicking to take pictures. Well, no, I wasn’t- I actually did take a couple as I sat at this light waiting for it to turn green, but it was getting dark and I didn’t have time to set the camera so they’d come out as anything but big blurs .

And here’s a video taken by some brave soul not too long after I went through.

Shortly after this they shut down pretty much all the roads in town.

Luckily I was driving the higher-off-the-ground Fit and not the very low-to-the-ground Civic, which we’ve already replaced one engine in after driving through what looked like a puddle  post-surprise-tropical-storm-Barry in Charleston. Otherwise I’d probably still be parked by the side of the road, weeping hysterically.

I thought getting through the intersection would be the big problem (and I couldn’t avoid it- all the back roads were blocked). But no! I live maybe five miles away, and whole five miles involved rapidly flooding highway, then the side road we live on was also flooding from all sorts of previously non-existent waterfalls coming off the mountains, as well as being covered in one spot by mud and sludge and gravel that I think slid down the mountain from "The Cottages", the obnoxious mountain-destroying student housing development on the next ridge from us.

I have never been so glad to get home in my LIFE. Naturally that night the temperatures dropped twenty degrees and it started snowing. So everything was covered in ice yesterday morning. Then it warmed up enough to get out. Now it’s snowing again and last time I looked out it appeared to be at least five inches. And still pouring down.

AAAGGGHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay. How about an adorable kitty picture to end on so that I don’t go completely insane?!?