kfrinkle, The latest rainfall projections for your area sure haven' gotten any better, and my part of Love County is straddling the line that divides the projected rainfall into the 3-6" category and the 6-9" category. Looks like the frogs are gonna be really happy and the gardeners much less so. Lisa, I imagine he is right. This year it seems like Norman floods at the drop of a hat. I imagine there will be lots of flash flooding and a lot of good old river flooding over the next few days. We had flash flooding overnight in part of our county (but not our part as most of that rain missed us too). Paula, It needs to be a big boat so it will carry a lot of potted tomatoes and peppers. All this rain has severely watered down the flavor of both tomatoes and plums. I suppose the tomatoes still taste better than grocery store tomatoes, but only just barely. Now that the peaches are breaking color and approaching the ripening stage, this big rainfall is going to come along and water down their flavor too. The rain hasn't hurt the quantity of produce we're harvesting but it sure has hurt the quality. As soon as they do the weather here on the noon news, it is back to the kitchen for me because I'm making plum jelly today. I probably should be outside building a plant ark and loading it up with 2 plants of each kind.... This morning, I heard on my county radio that a small amount of water (at that point, 1" deep) had just begun flowing across the Lake Murray spillway at Scenic Hwy 77. Hopefully that runoff from last night's very heavy rains north of us won't cause enough water to flow over the spillway that they have to close down the road. There's also a possibility that Lake Texoma may rise enough again to flow over the spillway again. The spillway is at 640 and the lake level currently is 637.70. It has taken it a couple of weeks to drop from the former high of 645.something and now it may go over the spillway for only the 5th time in its history. We weren't expecting the fifth time to occur so soon after the fourth time. We're expecting 3-6" in much of the area, with some areas getting 6-9". That much rain over a few days will fill up the lake quite a bit. It is funny. I thought it was mid-June and we were in the process of recovering from all the May rainfall. Suddenly, we're almost right back where we started, as if the two weeks of drying out never even happened. I feel sorry for anyone near the lake or river and especially folks downstream as they are about to have water damage and destruction all over again. On the bright side, all the rain made really nice-sized potatoes and lots of them which is wonderful since drought often causes smaller yields and smaller sized potatoes. Dawn

I'm glad you are finally getting some rain, but isn't that the way it always works-drought then floods. We had an excess of rain in July & well into August, but not much rain since. Not completely dry, but just 1/4" to 1/2" occasional rain, so not hurting but we've lost a lot of that excess rain we got in the summer. I prefer it this way though, doesn't seem to hurt the plants nearly so much with the cooler weather as it does with the heat.

Ingrid - so glad you are finally getting some rain! Your garden must be so happy. We have had 3 rain storms in the past 4 days, and fourth one is supposed to come in tonight, and another one tomorrow night. Yay! We have now gotten our "annual normal" (7/1 -7/1) amount of rain (35 inches), and it is still Jan! I grew up here, and can remember many winters like this, although of course not lately. The other afternoon we went to a nearby shopping mall (they recently re-did it to make it a covered mall, luckily) to see a movie. When the movie got out, we walked to the mall entrance nearest our car, and looked out (with a bunch of people who were standing by the doors). Ha! The rain was coming down so hard, and the wind was blowing so hard, that the rain was horizontal, and you could barely see. There was no way we were going to try to get to our car, which was only about 40 feet away. We waited 5 minutes, on the grounds that it must be a "cloud burst" which would stop, but it did not stop. So, dinner plans were changed, and we had dinner at a restaurant which was inside of the mall. The heavy heavy rain continued for another 1 1/2 hours, until we were done with dinner, and then stopped long enough for us to get home. Fun adventure! In the northern Sierra Nevada mountains, which are about 5 hours by car East of here, they are getting at least 4-6 feet of snow every other day. I am so happy to hear from you that So Cal is getting rain too - they said a few days ago that that part of the state was still under severe drought - hope it keeps up! Jackie

"One of the model homes" In my area, model homes are for tract builders. Tract builders have different economies than single lot builders. There are exceptions to this model but generally it is true. It isn't that teardown, permits etc cost that much (in my area), it is just that you are building on a single lot. There is also the reality that the single lot may have rules that developers don't have that add to cost. As someone who has done both, I will share some costs. We bought a $400k tear down that was 1800 sqft brick 2 story with carport. It cost $12k to teardown and haul away. We had to spend about $5k for some tree removal. The utility hook ups are inexpensive since they are already there - an empty lot is significantly more. Permitting is $3k which is inexpensive - what isn't is that it has taken 6 months and we still don't have permits. Surveys can be $5k - we have to modify lots when we tear down because the rules have changed so much since they were platted. There is water mitigation that can cost $15k for engineering and execution. Developments don't cost much more for the entire development. And then lastly, we expect $180 a sqft for the actual build. Spec houses in our neighborhood are about $1.2M for similar lots, 4500 sqft. We will build a little smaller but that doesn't help on costs that much. This is in Raleigh, an area with (usually) significantly lower costs than NoVa. No one in my area builds a "model home" on a single lot for $300-$400k at 3000 sqft. That being said, there are ways of getting cheaper homes built - ie modular - but that may not be an option depending on the jurisdiction.