Floody hell! Or: Why one should always check one's phone messages before leaving for work

The rains I reported earlier have continued... in fact according to news reports, some parts of Houston have received as much as a foot of rain over the last 24 hours; certainly there was rain, thunder and lightning for much of the night last night. When we got up there was the usual scramble to get exercised and showered and dressed in time to leave; a slow journey to Dave's work showed a lot of road flooding and high water everywhere.




However, it was only on my onward journey to work that the true magnitude of the situation revealed itself - I saw utility vehicles up to their roofs in water; Clay Road shut to all traffic with a few cars mournfully stranded in the high water;


deer struggling through knee-high water near the roadway; car after car abandoned after attempting too deep a crossing...


Close to work I had to go through my worst yet; a dip in the road where water must have come at least a third of the way up the car's doors. Having nowhere else to go I went through it, to the applause of some onlookers!

About a block from work I had occasion to look at my phone, where I found a message from earlier - classes were cancelled and the office was shut for the day. I promptly turned around to make my way home again, getting to within about five minutes of the house before being turned back and having to retrace my tracks for another 45 minutes to get around the high water on Highway 6... having left the house just before 8am, I was back inside shortly after 11am. I intend to stay here.

Note: I think I've managed about the worst pun possible in the title, but if anyone's got another to share - Dad, I'm looking at you - let's hear them ;)

Boys and bikes

As many of you know, Dave was planning to ride in the MS 150 last weekend, but due to an absolutely massive downpour on Friday evening and Saturday morning, the first stage of the ride was called off.

(Just for reference, here's that creek near home again - it was featured in an earlier blog post - so you can see what I mean by 'absolutely massive'.)


Anyway, we sensibly spent Saturday morning in the local iHop with our friends Matt and Rebecca, but on Sunday the guys decided they were going to ride somewhere; the official ride was continuing on the Day 2 route, but as that would have meant an early morning drive out to La Grange (in multiple cars to get both bodies and bicycles out there), and then contending with traffic and headaches in Austin in the evening before driving three hours home again, they decided to do their own thing... which ended up being an 85 mile round-trip out to Bellville, a small town out to the west of Houston.



Rebecca and I decided to surprise them by meeting them out there for lunch, but that was the only support they received - they covered the 85 miles in about 6 and a half hours of riding, which I think was pretty good going! I only wish I had a photo of them drinking beer and eating pie on the patio after they got home again...

My apologies for the long gap between posts - Dave's image-hosting website is still broken, which means I can't display photos as well as I'd like, which is a lot of the reason I blog in the first place! So I haven't been feeling all that inspired. Not to mention, extreme busyness at work, and having guests here, and lots on, has meant very little time - if you're one of the MANY waiting on an email from me, please accept my grovelling apologies!
In any case, I will be trying to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly again - not to mention catching up on my emails - and in the meantime you can click on any of the images above to see a larger version, even though I can't display the larger version within the post itself, as I would like.
Love to all my readers! (All three of you ;) )
xxx