It's Raining, It's Pouring...

...the gray skies are boooooring. (and scary, too.)

If there was a way to search through all of the Wisconsin bloggers in the blogiverse, I bet 99 percent of them blogged in the last couple days about the weather.

Lame topic, you say?

But there was nothing lame about the rain that came down on Saturday. When the news stories report that cars were floating away in intersections, and people were swimming to safety...it's time to sit up and take notice.

Seven Wisconsin counties reported tornadoes. In the streets, 200-pound manhole covers were flipped like pennies from the water pressure in the storm sewers below. (I didn't write that...I read it in this story. But isn't that great imagery?)

We had serious...serious...water in our state over the weekend. I was down in the Milwaukee area to spend some time with my sister and her family, and we watched the day change from blue skies to storm clouds to sheets of rain. When the storm sirens went off, we hit the basement, and the reservations we had for dinner at a Japanese hibachi place were put on hold.

My nephew still had to go out, though, to play in the band for his high school's graduation. Attendance at that event served as his final exam. With all the flash flood warnings and tornado warnings, I thought having graduation that day was pretty stupid. But I'm not a school administrator.

After hearing the storm sirens go off at least three times, and waiting out several waves (heh.) of rain showers, we decided the worst was over and went for Japanese food. We didn't float away.

My niece got a kick out of playing The Catching Game, as she called it...where the chef flipped shrimp off his spatula into the air for us to catch in our mouths. (yes, I caught mine.) And I got my sushi fix...so all was good.

The drive home was mostly uneventful, except for a 10-minute stretch halfway home where you couldn't see much, but you got one hell of a car wash as you drove. I don't drive with my hands at 10 and 2 very often, but I know when to hold on. My "reward" for making it through the downpour was a pretty spectacular lightning show from time to time on the rest of the drive.

Ten minutes of white-knuckling it during an hour and a half drive certainly isn't a whole lot to complain about, as it could have been much, much worse.

Yesterday it stayed gray throughout the day, and Mother Nature thought it would be a fun trick to play to make me spend most of my day either opening or closing my windows.

I'd open five or six of them, and sit down by the computer or the TV, and it would start to rain. So I'd close my windows, and five minutes later, the rain stopped. Soooo...I'd open them again. I repeated this process more times than I'm going to admit in this blog entry.

But, umm...

...sunny and 70, anyone?
I'm all for it.

"Don't knock the weather;
nine-tenths of the people
couldn't start a conversation
if it didn't change once in a while."
—Kin Hubbard