Oh Dear Lord. I was complaining earlier today about the fact that we’ve had 10 days of rain and it just seems like it will never end. Now? Oh my.
At about 8pm, going out to dinner seemed like such a good idea. Sure, it’s raining – but this is Houston! If you can’t handle rain you really need to leave. We’re tough, we won’t melt, so off we went to the restaurant.
The place was dead, but the service was great. As we were finishing up the waitress commented that they had closed because of the storm – not to rush, but she wanted to close out our check. Ok, no big deal. We talked for a little while after we finished our meal, hoping the storm would let up. No such luck. We finally decided that we could make it to the car, I would skip the errand I needed to run, and head for my place.
We had taken my car to the restaurant. Heading home, I tried to go down the main street to my apartment … until I noticed that the street was completely full of water. Uhm, ok, I’ll try to take “the back way” in, going through the subdivision and then down to my apartment. Ha! When I realized how deep the water was (I was about to float away) I pulled in to the first driveway I could get in to just to get out of the water.
DateMan hadn’t met my parents yet, and I didn’t really think that 10pm at night, soaked from the rain, was the best time to just drop in, but there were no other options left. It was either that or cruise around Houston looking for higher ground, so off to my parent’s house we went after a courtesy call to warn them that we were coming over. (They only live 8 blocks from my place, and about 5 blocks from where I was stranded at the moment.)
One problem. Their street was flooded too. I was able to make it to the house across the street from theirs, but no further. So I pulled in to the neighbor’s driveway, explained the situation, gave them the key to my car (I’ve known them since 1985, so I felt pretty safe) and asked them to move my car to my parent’s house when the water went down. Then we waded through water that was at least 7 inches deep (ewwww!) over to my parent’s house. Dad greeted us outside, and we went to the back porch to wait out the rain. Cozy and dry, which was better than we had been.
After awhile I realized the rain was letting up, so I went outside to look and discovered that the street had cleared and I could see the curbs and pavement again – quite a switch from the missing curbs earlier, water in to the yards of most houses. It seemed like it might be the only chance I would have to move my car, so we were off again. I got my car out of their driveway and headed for home.
But it wasn’t going to be that easy yet. Both routes to my place are still completely flooded – so I ended up parking in the lot across the street and we had to wade through water that was close to knee deep to get back to my place. Add to that the fact that my umbrella decided to leak, and I was pretty much soaked from head to toe.
Ahhhh… the stories we have to tell. Hopefully everyone else in Houston is doing ok and their evenings aren’t as exciting as ours. Only 8 inches of water in 3 hours here, and there is still more to come tonight. They claim that after 10 days straight of rain, it might finally go away for a little while. I don’t believe them. According to Weather.com the flood warning for Harris County doesn’t end until 8am tomorrow morning. Someone hand me some wading boots…