Record-Setting Rain

Today was the last day of the month. It rained early this morning with some golf ball-sized hail thrown into the mix.

These days I don't worry too much about hail as long as the Blazer is safe. I certainly don't worry the way I did when the boat took up the entire garage and the Blazer had to stay outside. There were a few crazy times when I parked it in a nearby parking garage and walked home during a thunderstorm, lightning flashing all around me. (Note that I didn't worry about hail thumping my head, only my vehicle). That's how much I fear hail damage.

Now I have room in the garage for the Blazer, but a new worry has replaced the old one. What if the hail crashes through the two skylights? As the hail pounded early this morning, I lay there immobilized, wondering how I would solve such a problem.

Luckily I didn't have to. Instead I went about my day wondering when the rain cloud that has been residing over Wichita might migrate to Death Valley or Phoenix. I tuned into the Weather Channel to see if their meteorologists had any insights regarding when things will start drying out. They shared this: there is a high probability we will get MORE rain tomorrow.

They also shared that our rainfall for this month is 290% times the average for May, with a record 12.8 inches.

It shows - my herb garden is thriving. For the first time this year I harvested some sweet basil to make bruschetta, which was delicious. But I feel as though I live in Panama. It's muggy, sticky, and hot. Not only that, but this evening I discovered more dampness in the basement. The carpet in one corner is soaked.

Sigh. Wet basements, too, are part of the excitement of living on the edge of the city. The very, very wet city.

No Time to Wallow in the Mire

The average monthly rainfall in Wichita during May is 4.16 inches and in June it’s 4.25 inches. That means nearly two months of rain have fallen in just five days. THAT means my back yard has recently turned into a morass of muck and mud.

If I’d been a little kid I would have squealed and squished – squealed with joy at the opportunity to squish my toes in such pristine mud. But I'm not a little kid - I'm an adult who worried about the two window wells in the basement that kept filling up with water, almost to the glass. Another inch of water and the pressure would have pushed them in, allowing oozy mud to seep indoors.

Last night when I discovered this I started bailing water out of the wells, but the rain fell so hard and fast I had to come inside. I bailed again in the morning and then at intervals used a fountain pump to remove the water. Did any of this hard work make a difference? I’m not sure.

What it did was confirm that once upon a time in the life of my home and property, someone working on the landscape architecture either reversed the drawings or had a malfunctioning level that tilted the wrong way. My back yard slopes. Toward the house. Following is a dialogue that I imagine took place during the construction of my home, an era long ago, prior to GPS, cell phones, Facebook, and good restaurants in Las Vegas.

Landscape Guy #1: “Hey, shouldn’t the dump truck be closer to the house? Do we really want the dirt that far out?”

Landscape Guy #2: “Nah, fuhgettaboutit, we’ll just rake it in a nice little slope away from the house, sorta like this – hey, isn’t it time for lunch?”

There are places near the house that are like a miniature reservoir, with standing water six inches deep. Tufts of unmowed grass dot the yard like small islands. It’s possible to avoid most of the mud by leaping from one tuft of grass to the next. In contrast, the back of the lot looks normal. It’s almost a desert by comparison.

This is the most rain that has fallen in one month since I moved here. What I found today on http://www.wunderground.com/ (Weather Underground) confirms it:

“When it rains... OH can it pour. This is especially true in May 2008 as yesterday's record-shattering calendar day total of 3.23 inches at Wichita's Mid-Continent Airport for May 26th brought the monthly total to 11.45 inches. This easily breaks the monthly May record of 11.22 inches set 73 years ago which... oddly enough... was during the dustbowl era of the mid 1930s. Of this 11.45 inch rainfall total 6.31 inches... or 55 percent of the monthly total... drenched Wichita Mid-Continent in a 3-day period spanning the 24th through the 26th.”

There you have it. It rained the entire Memorial Day Weekend and it would be great to have the weekend again only with better weather. Squishing my toes in all that mud reminded me of something else kid-like: Can we have do-overs?

Rain, Rain, Go AWAY!

Wherever you are in the world, if you watched The Weather Channel at all this weekend you may have noted that the entire state of Kansas has been marked in red, indicating a high probability of severe weather.

It has rained every day for the past four days, with several weather adventures happening every day. None of them tornadoes, thankfully, at least not in my little suburb. My heart goes out, though, to all the folks whose weather adventures were of the tornado type. Some people lost their cars, some their homes, and a few, their lives.

About six inches of rain have fallen here in the last four days. I knew it was getting bad when I went downstairs and found the cat adrift in the basement, clinging to a couch pillow with the remote in her paw.

Yes, Mother Nature is on a tear this spring. While I am thankful that a tornado has not leveled my home, I am finding all this water frustrating. My back yard has become a marsh. I fear I will need an airboat to get around it if the rain continues. While I always appreciate an excuse for not having to mow the lawn, today was different. I would much rather have mowed the back yard today than continue to hear the sound of rain pummeling my skylight. I did manage to mow the front before the latest deluge, a small victory on a very wet weekend.

During the brief break from rain I also planted some tomato plants in the mushy raised bed. If all goes well, in about 90 days I will have enough tomatoes to start a small salsa canning business. Of particular note is a hybrid called “Mr. Stripey” that features orange and red stripes. I don’t know how Mr. Stripey will taste on mayonnaise-slathered honey wheatberry bread, accompanied by his friends Mr. Bacon and Ms. Lettuce, but I was intrigued enough by his looks to purchase a couple of his plants to find out. I also planted a Roma, four Big Boys, and a couple of Beefsteak. There’s still room in the garden for more, but before I surrender the space to just any hybrid, I want to conduct additional research and locate some rare heirlooms to see if they will grow in my corner of the world.

But if this rain continues, Mr. Stripey and the Big Boys will float off before they have a chance to thrive. I just hope they don’t take the cat with them. She still has the remote.