Rained Out

Well, if you live here locally, you can imagine that Ch's race was indeed rained out. He was pretty upset. He had been so ready: car's gears changed to match the requirements of the track, the weights shifted around appropriately to suit the upcoming track conditions, a new friend ready to come to the track with him, the car washed and mud free. He's had H practicing all week on using his new-fangled stopwatch and marking the times, so he could record his dad's lap times and those of the lead car. The car was even loaded up in the trailer and ready for us to pull out of here today promptly at 2 o'clock.

We were wondering last night if there would be rain trouble. When a weather forecaster on the news predicts 60-80% chance of rain it can mean one of three things. Either they are right on with their predictions, or they have just timed it wrong. The third option is that they missed the mark completely, but that actually doesn't seem to happen much these days thanks to their massive modern computer weather analysis programs. Today, they miscalculated when the rain would hit us. We woke up to tornado watches which included our county. We expected rain to occur starting sometime fairly early in the morning. The race track, a little north of us, said they would call the "rain-out" by 1:00 p.m. if he was going to call it at all. They weren't getting any rain either.

They finally called a cancellation on the race at around 4:15 p.m. and they really needed to. Evidently there was a lot of street flooding there in the area they ended up with so much rain. But I feel like I wasted half of my day, waiting to find out what would happen. I had to keep checking the radar on the computer, and the track's website every so often. I needed to pick up a prescription (a 1/2 hr. drive north of me) and made it there in time before closing, but I've never made it there that late before, and didn't even know when they would close! As it is, I barely made it to the library just 5 min. before closing time. But I'm glad to have the books I requested, since if I don't get them within a few days of them calling that they're in, they will return them to the host library. Invariably, they always come in the very afternoon of the same day I had already visited the library in the morning.

Well, we finally got some rain here at our house. It started raining around 7 p.m. and hasn't really stopped until now. It is pretty late now, after midnight. It let up somewhat a few times, but rained continuously since then. I cannot wait to check the rain gauge to see how much rain we got. It should be quite a bit this time. As I sit here tonight, typing up this blog post, I can look out my front window across to our adjoining neighbor's property, and see a really large spot of water. It's dark outside, but it's actually reflecting the moon light. That's how I know we must have gotten substantial rain because that "lake" has been dry for many months now.

I do worry about our little bitty tomato plants though. They were out in the storm. I didn't think to bring them in for cover but probably should have. They are very small. We started them from seeds. They actually sprouted very well, but may be quite flat now if the rain was too hard on them.

And what am I doing up so late? Insomnia of course, induced by the fact that we are still under tornado watches. It has that kind of effect on me. Ch sleeps like a log and won't even wake up for a security alarm blaring away in his ear. So the burden is on me to hear stuff in the night, like the sound of tornadoes, or kids stumbling around in their sleep, looking for the bathroom. This has happened a few times already in our new house, and it wasn't pretty. Yes, lucky me. The boys both sleep very soundly, just like their dad.