Sorie's out that way too. It's too far NE to be in Bon's area, isn't it? Maybe they'll check in here later.....

Bon is west of me and the watches look like they are east. I have gotten flash flood warnings on the phone. All it is doing here is @#$%&*%# raining.

We were in the shelter about 20 min. Ok here. Just wet LOL

Glad you're okay.

We're fine. Nice and calm. In fact, the sun is peeking out.

looks like another round of thunder storms are moving in here.

Hope everyone is ok. We had cloudy humid weather but no storms today.

Carol, I was worried about you when I heard The Weather Channel say Grove, OK, and had to run from the kitchen to the living room to see what they were saying. I am so glad y'all are okay. I figured if you were home, all the neighbors were with you and you were serving coffe and coffee cake or something. Mmmm. Cinnamon rolls. I sure wish I lived right next door to you right now. (grin)

Saturated soil? When will it ever end? After tonight and tomorrow morning's rain, we have sunshine and no rain in our forecast for Sunday through Thursday. I am so excited about that and hope you all have a great forecast like that too.

Sorie, Glad to hear you're okay as well. I had forgotten you lived in the same area as Carol.

Robert, This must be your week to be right in the path of all the ongoing storms. I hope your tractor isn't floating downhill or anything.

Stockergal, We had some sunshine and heat yesterday and I was outside a lot, partly because we had to go to a structure fire and then worked at the fire station for a while after that, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I was so hot and tired and kept thinking "what's wrong with you?". I finally figured it out. I've been so used to cool cloudiness that a sunny day with a high of 87 and a heat index of 93 just knocked me for a loop. I guess we'll all get to toughen up and get used to the heat and high heat index numbers next week when the rain finally goes away (and hopefully stays away for a good long while too).

There's a lot of ugly weather in my forecast for tonight, and just so none of you will worry, I am aware of it and will be watching it all night long, if need be. I'll have the phone, my laptop, the fire radio and my three (yes, three!) NOAA weather radios. If any ucky, yucky weather is approaching us, we'll be watching it and taking shelter appropriately. I hope the crap in our forecast misses us, but am ready if it comes. If I never hear the words "heavy rainfall" and "flash flooding" ever again, I'll be perfectly okay with that.

Maybe with the drying trend for next week, our gardens will dry out, we can salvage whatever we can, and replant whatever we can't, and just move on and get over the spring of 2015 as the summer of 2015 approaches.

stockergal, I know how hard some of the ranchers here are working to keep their cattle on high ground, safe and sound, and well-fed. I hope that y'all have been able to keep your cattle in good condition through all this horrid weather and without undue hardship.

I just have to add that I know more than one rancher whose tractor is bogged down in the mud right now, waiting for someone with a bigger tractor to come out and pull their tractor out of the mud as soon as we get just a little bit of drying here.

Dawn

Dawn, cattle are all on high ground, but I look at the pictures of Texas and wonder if high ground is high enough. We cannot keep the tractors from getting buried, we use one to pull the mixer and another to pull it. I really cannot remember walking through mud this deep this long! I know the mosqitoes are going to be bad but the flies are king right now, they are horrible. The ground is starting to get that sour smell it gets after being wet for a long period of time, hope the dry weather comes next week as forecast.

I hope everybody gets to dry out next week.

I talked to my nephew in southern Oklahoma tonight and he said he was sure tired of locking the hubs on his 4 wheel drive truck. He has a lot of cows to check also but I think most of them are on high ground, but it is wet high ground. It is strange to see that so many of you have reached your average annual rainfall amount before the end of May.

In Grove, the automated system has called us 2 days in a row to offer us sand and sandbags. One of our friends lives on the high side of a street where he is watching the water creep up into his 'across the street' neighbors back yard. He said that he could see fish jumping and people were out there fishing. That was before today's storm.

stockergal, I agree on the deep mud and the flies. I have to battle my way through swarms of flies every time I'm near the chicken coop or chicken pen. I don't know how our soft mushy ground ever recovers----it is going to be pock-marked with big deep footprints and mower tire ruts. I'm excited about the prospect of eventually having at least the soil surface dry out. We have clay, so it will stay wet, wet, wet, wet, wet forever, and then one day, suddenly it will be dry, and the next day it will begin contracting and cracking. It always happens that way and you go from feeling far too wet to thinking "uh oh, the ground is cracking". The difference, this year, compared to most recent years will be that even after the soil surface cracks, I'll know that there still is great soil moisture down for at least a couple of feet.

I do feel for the Texas ranchers. Yesterday on the news they showed cows in the Houston area scrambling to find any little bit of high ground after the San Jacinto River overflowed its banks. There was talk that the ranchers were going to hire a chopper to go in there and lift out the cows. I know that's been done before, but I don't know how they get a cow to cooperate with that helicopter hovering overhead. Maybe they sedate them slightly to keep them calm. While rarely a problem here (sometimes we get 1 or 2 in the river south of Lake Texoma), the folks in Houston will need to remain alert for alligators that have come up into their neighborhoods along with the flood waters.

Carol, Thankfully there is a lot of high ground here in southern OK. It is a good thing. The Flood Warning for the Red River continues to advise folks with cattle in the bottom lands to be sure their cattle have been moved to high ground that is at least 10' above the nearest river bank. That's actually an improvement. A while back they were advising 11'. We'll take whatever little progress we can get. With so much water flowing over the spillway at Lake Texoma and with flood gates discharging additional water, the river should start dropping more quickly....or at least that is what we are being led to believe. I am sure that the rain falling last night and this morning isn't helping any, but at least we have a dry week stretching out ahead of us after the rain stops today.

Tim and Chris both drove through heavy rain in Texas this morning on their way home from work, but I think we have been incredibly lucky here, as the storm veered more south and east overnight and largely has missed us here. We're just getting light rain, and some places south of us in TX got over 3". They didn't need it any more than we do, but that's the luck of the draw, I guess.

I don't even know how we dry out from all of this, but I'm going to enjoy watch it happening. I am sure we are in for an epic battle with fleas, ticks, flies, ants and mosquitoes, but the lakes, rivers and stock tanks all desperately needed a wet year, and we have to appreciate the rainfall in that way, even though it has made gardening a miserable mess this spring. I'd gladly put up with every muddy, mucky, stinky, gross, slimey, icky bit of water, mud and moss-covered soil (our red clay currently is clothed in green) if it means that western and southwestern OK get to have water back in their lakes again and, maybe just maybe, see their watering restrictions dropped altogether or at least dialed back a great deal.

The worst thing about it is the deaths due to flooding and other severe weather, and the damaged or destroyed homes that have been undercut by river flooding and lake flooding. My heart goes out to all the people who have been affected in this way. Mother Nature can be so cruel.

Dawn

I was in Stilwell yesterday when my daughter called and said, "There is a tornado near Lake Tenkiller and it is projected to track toward Wahilla and Spade Mountain. Go home and get Dad and come back to town." Wauhilla is two miles west and Spade Mountain is two miles north. Luckily by the time I got home, the thing had veered more westerly, weakened and lifted, so we stayed put. But that was too close for comfort. I wish we had a storm shelter.

Wow, that makes me wish you had a storm shelter too. I am glad that it veered, weakened and lifted.

We have had to run to the storm shelter multiple times this year, but in every single case, while we had tornadoes in the air, they only briefly touched the ground for a few seconds, and always in a remote area where there wasn't really anything to damage.

At the time we put in the storm shelter, I sure hated to spend the money on it. We had been here only a year and the list of things we wanted to do to our property was long. The storm shelter moved to the top of the list, though, because we moved here just a few weeks before the May 1999 tornado hit OKC and its suburbs, and that thing scared us enough that we postponed building a chicken coop, the garage, the screen porch, etc. so we could afford to get the storm shelter put in. I would rather have spent the money on something that was more "fun", but I do concede that it was a practical choice and one I don't regret. We have been in that shelter more times than I can count, and I'd be a nervous wreck in storm season if we didn't have it.

Someday I'd like to put in an above-ground safe room. Our neighbors have one in the corner of their oversized garage, and I want to put one in ours one of these days. While we still are young enough now that going up and own the stairs in the underground shelter is not yet a problem, I know that when I am a couple of decades older than I am now, I won't want to have to go up and down those steep stairs. I know some older folks, now in their 80s and 90s, that have a hard time getting down the storm shelter steps. In some cases, their kids almost have to carry them down those stairs, and I'd like to get an above-ground safe room built before we get to that age.