And Then There Was Rain...

It's Fall!

 Fall means decorations.  I like decorating for fall and halloween more than I like decorating for Christmas.

I don't know why.

Don't ask me hard questions.

 I like to put spanish moss on all the things. 

It's a mess.  I dig it.

 Would it be weird if I sat at the dining room table by myself and stared at my decorations?

Cause I kinda want to.

I'd probably sit in the dark.  And scare the beejeezus out of Wilberforce.

That sounds like a great idea.  I now have a to-do list for tomorrow.  With one item on the list.  "Sit and scare W".

Busy day ahead.

 Oh look, it's raining outside.  More on that later.

 Pumpkins, pumpkins, everywhere!

If this blog were scratch and sniff, I would totally post my pumpkin scented candles that are currently making my house smell like a Bath and Body Works.  Yay.



It's been really rainy and chilly and wonderful lately, which I love, except it's not very motivating to get my happy hinney to the gym.

So Wilberforce and I worked out at home yesterday.  Just like the good ol' days of P90x.  Awwwww.

 First thing I do in the mornings: light pumpkin candles.  And close the windows that Wilberforce opened the night before because he likes to live on the edge and see how many nights we can have the windows open before someone breaks in and steals us blind.

Or maybe he likes the fresh air.

Whatever.

 Notice the rain.

It rained for 40 days and 40 nights.

Back in the day.  Not recently.  But it kinda feels like that long.  I didn't mind it.

Until last night.  I worked noon to nine at night.  My drive home is usually thirty minutes.  I pulled into the garage at 10:30pm.  Not cool.

When I finally made it home, all I wanted was my big bowl of dessert goulash and my pillow.

 So that's what I got.




Anyway, my drive home was a mess. 

The first twenty minutes was uneventful.  Then I hit the first road block.  Road closed due to flooding from an irrigation ditch.  Boo.

I turned around, backtracked 3 miles, and went another way.  No more road blocks.  Happy happy happy.  Then, two and half miles from my front door: road block.  Flooding.

Backtrack a mile, go another route.  Road block.  Bridge flooded.  Turn around, go to the other side of the first road block I initially encountered, see flashing lights.  Grr.  Drove through standing water, but the emergency crew let me through.  Another 5 miles and I'm home.

Wilberforce wasn't so lucky.  My standing water intersection was closed by the time he got off work.  He ended up driving miles out of the way to the interstate, down around our area and back up from the south.  Like a giant spiral around our house.  Ridiculous.



I texted my boss last night and told him we had issues getting home and heads up but there's a possibility I might have trouble in the morning.

I got up, got ready for work, had W call the police station to find out how to get out of town to the city we work.  The cop told him the one route that was still open, which involved driving the same spiral-ish route that W had taken the night before.

Cool.  Good thing I planned ahead and got up early to allow for a longer commute.

Went about making my breakfast.  Turned on the news.  That one route the cop had given us?  Closed. Covered in water.

Flood Day?

I'll take it.

 So I called the boss.  Put the pajamas back on.  And baked.

 Pumpkin bread, of course!  The recipe is under the recipe page.  Perfect Pumpkin Bread.

 Our house smelled ahhhhhmazing.

We may be stranded with no way to get anywhere.  Including the grocery store, but we're the Clarks and we don't mess around when it comes to food.  We've always got enough to feed a small army.

Or the two of us for a few days.

Rumor has it we may have a route opened up to get out tomorrow.  We'll see.  The flooding hasn't maxed out yet.

The following are pictures I found on instagram of area flooding.

W was supposed to play in a tourney with his boss and some other pharmacists from the hospital this morning.  This is that golf course today:

Remember that first road block from my drive home last night?  And the standing water I drove through to get home?  This is that intersection today:

 The other side of those railroad tracks is where I was stuck originally...and about 10 miles of driving around road blocks landed me on this side of those tracks thirty minutes later.  Obviously closed completely now.



That is my town.  That's where the grocery store is.  The gym.  The library.  But not me.  Because I live on this side of that flood water, and you can't get there from here.

 This is the road I drive every day to go to work.  The road I run to get to the gym.

Another post of the road into town.  And these are from this morning.  The flooding has increased drastically since then - if it's not raining in the morning I'm going to go for a run to check out the flood water.

Another of the few routes I usually take to work.

The cop shop gave us a route this morning to get to work.  This is what it looked like when we turned on the news.  I found a picture of it on instagram this afternoon.  This is why we didn't make it to work today.

I drive 37th Street through Evans to get to my store.  Notice the caption of this picture.

The flooding is craaaaazy.  Boulder got slammed last night and now the entire area around us is covered in water.  We are literally up on this ridge like a little island in the middle of the ocean.  Our home is safe...we're just stranded with no place to go.  We're counting our blessings that our only issue is not being able to go anywhere and that we aren't dealing with a house under water, as a huge amount of folks in our community are right now.

#prayforcolorado


The rain has stopped for now.  Another storm is forecast to go through tonight, but hopefully it won't produce much moisture.  And Dad, the rain amounts I saw on TV this afternoon were between 5 and 9 inches of rain in different towns in Northern Colorado.  So there's the answer to that question.

I'll post pictures of our morning run tomorrow if it's not raining!