I'd like some, please. We're so ready for a little cooler weather. I dread the humidity, but, hey, it's Oklahoma, right?

Yeah. Humid here, too. Lightening and some thunder. It's coming.

I finished baling up my hay today. Well I will have some small square bales to do later , hopefully. I still have to move all the hay out of the fields and i'll probably do that at night while it's cooler. I did the same thing after getting the baler cleaned up and put back in the barn, I came in took a shower and stayed in.

Of course it was mid afternoon by then and the heat had set in . I need to do some watering on my fruit trees since the rain doesn't look like it is going to hit here.

I need to move some cows I have across the road since I sold the bull that was with them. I also need to decide if I'm going to keep a couple of heifers or send them to the sale. I've lost a few cows so I need to keep a few. But that would mean I need another young bull and the prices are around the $3000 mark for them now.

I guess I need to stop before I keep adding to my to-do list.

There is a spectacular light show south of us. I guess parts of Bixby got hammered this afternoon and looks like that area is getting it again. There is a lot of red on the radar to the west, I think it will hit us, too.

Storm here in the panhandle Saturday night and again last night. Now it's storming again tonight. Neither nights have been as bad as Saturday was. Last time I looked at the forecast my area was supposed to have rain/thunderstorms through Wednesday, with a break, then storming again Saturday night.

Obviously I know we need the rain, but at this point it's a bit annoying at the same time. The drive-in theater in Guymon shows two movies Friday-Sunday night, but one of the rules is you have to turn your car off. I'd planned to go on Saturday, and then again Sunday, but it was already raining before showtime, so I didn't go. I've learned from past attempts that trying to watch movies at the drive-in during a rainstorm is pretty useless.

Despite that, I am glad this area is finally getting so much rain. We get such long stretches of no rain, so it's nice to drive around and see actual green on the ground. :)

-Kim

I'm enjoying the 74° !! And not too much rain. Cooking up a storm before summer comes back.

I'd like some rain too, but we aren't forecast to get any, so summer didn't leave us, even for a few hours. It did feel more pleasant this morning---only 75 degrees when I went outside around sunrise instead of 77 or 78. I stayed out for almost 5 hours because it was partly cloudy and didn't seem like it got insanely hot as quickly as it has been on most days. By the time I came indoors, the sun had come out from behind the clouds, the temperature was in the upper 80s and the heat index was in the mid-90s, and I'd had all the fun outdoors that I could stand.

I watered the plants in containers and also the new tomato plants we've got growing for fall, but spent most of my time in the garden weeding and pruning. I also used the string trimmer to cut back the grass growing around the outside of my garden fence. I've been doing a lot of hacking back of the grassy wildflower-filled fields now that the bobcats are prowling around every afternoon and evening. I want to get all the tall stuff cut back so the chickens can see them coming, but I'm still cutting around some of the wildflowers that still are in bloom (monarda, Mexican hat, coreopsis, sunflowers, some cosmos, rudbeckias, and a few other scattered bloomers here and there) so that the butterflies, bees and other little flying creatures still will have some flowers.

I think it will be too hot to work outdoors this afternoon and need to hang around the house anyway as a switch has gone out on the HVAC system and our HVAC guy is coming sometime this afternoon to put in a new switch. If I was out in the back pasture mowing, I might not hear him when he arrived and he might think no one was home.

There's been a lot of haying around here lately and some of those pastures have more bales of hay than I've ever seen sitting in them before. It kind of depends on whether someone is getting their first cutting or the second cutting. Obviously the ones who are doing a second cutting aren't getting as much hay since they already hayed those pastures back in May. Then, there's all those river bottom land/flood plain areas that normally would be hayed by now. They aren't looking too good and likely won't produce hay this year. The ones I can see from roads we travel still are buried under tons of silt and some of them have big pools of water left behind after the river floodwaters receded.

Cloudy and cooler here this morning and early afternoon. Ihope it stays cloudy all day. Got about 1" of rain last night. They sure we're loud and full,of lightning. Everything that could got in my way this morning and so my "get it done in one cool day list" is shot. I have not got one thing done today I was planning and this afternoon I have to go to Norman so maybe I can get a few things done this evening.

i have enjoyed this cool time but,we will pay for it the rest of the month.

oldbusy1, sounds like your going in about three different direction , that's farming and cattle for ya.

Dawn, hate to here about the AC. Sorry you missed on the showers and cooler day. Keep the Bobcats away.

bluerosebud3, I didn't think there was a drive-in movie still open in the state. I think it would be a little hard to,watch a movie in the rain.

Chickencoupe, it looks like you got the cooler day.

The AC has been repaired, for which I am so very grateful. There's still no rain in the forecast but there's nothing we can do about that.

I think Paula might be swimming again.

Oh no. Not again.

While I am a little unhappy that the rain is staying north of us and I am having to water the garden plants, I am not surprised. We have already had so much rain this year that it would be really shocking to get a whole lot more. We are less than 6" away from setting an all-time annual rainfall record for our county. I expect we'll get enough rain in the autumn to set that record, but I am not necessarily expecting much rain in July or August. Clearly the rainfall pattern has shifted northward, and that's actually a good thing. Much of northern OK still is far behind southern OK in year-to-date rainfall and this week's rainfall is helping close that gap.

I'll link the year-to-date rainfall map.

Paula only needs 9" more there in Norman to catch up with our 54" here. At the rate things are going, I think it could happen.

As this El Nino continues to strengthen, I'm starting to worry that California might get too much drought-breaking rain and that they'll have tremendous flooding and mud slides. I know the folks in Cali are hoping for rain, but I hope they don't get incredibly heavy, damaging rainfall. Many of us here already have experience heavy, heavy drought-breaking rains here in OK this year, and I wouldn't wish that type of flooding on anyone anywhere no matter how badly they need rain.

Year-To-Date Rainfall Map

Sorry you didn't get any rain. We got it yesterday morning and a pretty good bit last night. This morning I was out thinning the purple basil,or perilla, or whatever it is and I got caught in a brief shower. Let the mugginess begin.

I hope you weren't without AC for long, Dawn. It must have been miserable.

My hat is off to those of you who hay. I remember my brother going to work the hay fields at night many years ago when we lived in Stratford.

Dawn, since the rain doesn't follow the calendar, I think the real story for you is hidden in the 365 day map. WOW

we missed the rain till early morning. Got another 3/4" and another shower late morning. The sun is coming out and we will cook. Rain needs to go away for a whIle we need to start cutting corn silage. The corn fields are so muddy the fields will not hold up any equipment, so we need the horrible heat. Just have to grin and bear it.

The Other Carol (Sandplum), It was only acting up for a couple of days and didn't completely quit cooling until Monday evening. Tuesday morning Tim spoke to our HVAC guy, who said he'd send a crew out, although they couldn't get to us until the afternoon. I wouldn't have been shocked if we'd had to wait a few days given that it is so danged hot and all. They came, they fixed it and all was well, except one of them, who is a firefighter for the Wilson VFD (in Carter County adjacent to our county) and who knows Tim is a FF here in our area, told us that while he was here working, his VFD got paged out to a grass fire on Hwy 76 in Carter County. It boggles my mind that we have grass dry enough to burn, although I know it is true just from looking at our back pasture. I am not ready for the fields to start burning, and there's still a lot of green mixed with the brown so we might not have a widespread problem developing yet.

Oh, and y'all can stop feeling sorry for me. I headed out the back door to get the mower out of the garage so I could mow grass early this morning and raindrops (mere sprinkles but enough to wet the grass and cancel my plan to mow) started falling on my head. It took a really long time of really light rain, but eventually we had a whole 0.06" in the rain gauge. Well, it could have been only 0.05"----when you're looking at the hundredths on a gauge marked in tenths, you're only guessing. So, there, we got rain after all.

The mugginess is horrible. It is a good day to finish up the outdoor work and be inside by noon.

Carol, Because I didn't want to rub our good fortune in anyone else's face, I haven't linked that map, but now that you mentioned it, I will. It is mind-blowing to see how much rain has fallen since our drought-breaking rains began falling in June 2014. I don't know if you remember but we had escalated to "Extreme" on the U. S. Drought Monitor very quickly and Lee, who works with the OK data submitted to the Drought Monitor group, gave me a heads-up here on the forum that if rain didn't start falling quickly, we would move to Exceptional Drought very, very soon. It seems like it was only a week or so later that the rain started falling and really didn't stop, except for a brief dry spell last Aug/Sept. While the 365-day map looks great now, it was closer to 80" when I looked at it sometime back in June.

When you look at the map and see our rainfall for the last year, it is hard to comprehend that it took almost all of that rain to bring us out of drought. It is a monstrous number. I'd say about the last 12-15" have fallen since we made it out of drought, but I still couldn't believe it took such a huge amount to get us back into the white on the U. S. Drought Monitor map.

More shocking, though, is that despite having all that rain fall, we are getting really, really dry in the upper few inches of the soil, our big pond that was full and overflowing is almost empty again, the ground is cracking, and all the beautiful, lovely green is fading to tan, wheat, brown, or just that flat, dull green it gets as it dehydrates in the hot air. The spider mite population is exploding, possibly is peaking and should start falling soon, but by then it may be too late for most of the spring tomato plants.

Stockergal, I hate that y'all cannot get into the corn silage going because of the muddy fields. I'd send you all the horrible heat we have down here if I could. As much as we all long for more rain in the summer, it sometimes creates more problems than it solves.

Now, y'all, here is the 12-month rainfall map. The Love County total is beyond ridiculous. I don't know if we'll ever see a 12-month period this wet again. To see it now, and to still be so dry despite all the rainfall, just really emphasizes how much rainfall can be required to end a multi-year drought.

Dawn

OK Mesonet Map: Rainfall For Last 365 Days

Thunder, lightening and more rain. Unbelievable! Tiny storm, but hefty. The lawn looks beautiful, but DANG. I just finished mowing. Like what stockergal wrote MOW MOW MOW WEED WEED WEED

We had good rain Monday night, Tuesday night, and a very short term drenching today. We are good with just what we have at my house, but it was an extremely isolated storm today.