Happy Birthday!

Hi Cindy!
You beat me to the birthday punch. I wanted to write a post last night but we had another big storm and ended up not turning the computer on at all. I think we got over an inch at our house. Not quite as much as the big storm a couple of weeks ago but still a goodly amount. The street was flooded again. And the broken branch in the olive tree is now on the ground, although that may have happened in our small storm on Tuesday night.

Do you have anything special planned for today? Dinner out?

Our friends Fred and Penny got married in Seattle last weekend. We didn't get to go up there for the wedding but they're down here for a few days for a mini-honeymoon and we went out for dinner with them on Wednesday. It was great to see them, we don't get to often enough. Fred sang to Penny during the ceremony and one of his friends posted it on YouTube.

The Opening Ceremonies of the the Olympics are tonight which means that when I get home I can start knitting again on DH's Cobblestone Sweater which is my project for the UFOLympics. It will be a push to get it done in 16 days but I'm planning on spending as much free time as possible on it. Look for updates!

And finally, a sign I found, probably at Stuff On My Cat. I may have sent it to you already but it makes me laugh so I thought I'd post it too. Several of the people that work with DH love it too.

Happy Birthday!

Alene

Monsoon Madness

Hi Cindy!

We had quite a monsoon storm yesterday afternoon, as you can see from the video below.

We had just taken the garbage out when the rain arrived. The deluge kept up for over an hour and the weather service estimates that Tempe, and locales adjacent, got approximately 2.4 inches. Much of the rest of the valley got less than an inch.

Our street was flooded up to my ankles when I walked out to the gutter. Hardy Drive, the bigger street at the end of our block, looked like it had turned into a raging river. A couple of cars drove down our street and turned around because they didn't dare cross the flood.

Our front yard flooded but that's not too uncommon. Our back yard also flooded and the pool came within an inch of overtopping. The bird bath is almost 2 inches deep and was overflowing in no time. The best part is that the temperature dropped at least 20 degrees as the storm moved in.

The rain came down so hard and so quickly that it over took the pumps along the low part of the Superstition Freeway near our house. ADOT ended up closing it in both directions for about 3 hours before they could get the water drained.

Many of our city parks have retention basins in them to collect the runoff from big storms. The picture below is Hanger Park, some where in Tempe. Nothing like paddling through the play area in your canoe! The picture above and below are ones that were sent in by readers at AzCentral.

No FO's today as the weather excited me too much. Did you see that the World's Oldest Blogger passed away over the weekend? She was 108 and had written her last blog entry about three weeks ago.

Take care, more soon! A