How High's the Water, Mama?

We are getting wet in Iowa. How wet, you ask?   

Well, we've had rain nearly every day for about a week now, and Monday nights rain was a 3 hour event where it rained hard, then harder, and then harder still, and even harder after that!

It was crazy loud inside the house and was scaring the smaller'ish Chinese boy!

We ended up in our area with what was said to be an inch of rain per hour, and less than a mile West of us, they got 4 inches in those same three hours and a little bit West of that got around 7 inches of rain in roughly 4.5 hours!!!  

That's a mess!

I was trying to go to bed, but was concerned about the electricity going off with potential for water coming into the sump pit.  Well, it was just coming in, it was POURING IN!!!  Never in the 13 years that we've lived here have I seen more than about 10 tiny drops per minute.   This thing was firing about every 12 seconds (after it shut off from the previous run) for nearly two hours!

This is a picture of our creek thru the front yard that was taken after I got home from work on Tuesday afternoon.  Note all of the weeds that are laid over flat and the sticks/brush in the lower-right side of the picture.  The water nearly came over the driveway, but didn't quite make it this time!

The previous shot was taken off to the right of this picture.  This is just showing the weeds/grasses laid over from the heavy waters.

And then, suddenly, today happened!

I went into work early and looked at the weather almost immediately upon my arrival.  It called for a sunny, dry day with NO RAIN IN SIGHT!

Around 11a.m.,  we started seeing storms popping up on the radar and then started getting warnings on the local news web pages, followed quickly by our phones.

I left early to work from home and drove home just a bit North of the storm and as a result, got to witness some amazingly cruel looking skies!

The most amazing part of the clouds is down behind those trees and I couldn't get a good picture of it.  There were "fingers" of lighter colored clouds that almost looked like a claw, or, if you'd rather,  the tips of about 10 funnel clouds, although there was no rotation.  Thank God.  By the time I took this picture, the winds were blowing mercilessly out of the South as you can see the trees leaning!