And the Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up....

 The average amount of rainfall for Oklahoma in July is 3 inches.  On Thursday we were already at 4 inches, but Mother Nature decided to bless us with a little bit more.  And when I say a little, I mean my phone was blowing up all night with warnings and alerts from the National Weather Service about flash flooding in our area.  I drove Benjamin to work on Friday when we got up because our parking lot, and subsequently the road leading to campus, was nothing but a river, and I didn't like to think of him walking through all that to get to work... besides, his shoes stink horribly when they're wet.  I moaned and grumbled about this silly state and how they don't have drainage systems on their major roadways, but made it to and from his work without incident.  This was at 8:00 in the morning.  By 9:30 when I needed to go to work, the parking lot and streets were pretty much dry again, so I headed on my merry way thinking, "well, that wasn't so bad after all".  Little did I know what was waiting for me out on the country roads.  First off I came to a construction sign that said "Road closed to thru traffic" so I went around it, thinking "I'm not 'thru traffic', this is right where I need to go" and then about 1/2 a mile later I ran into this:

 "Ahhh.. so when they said 'Road closed to Thru Traffic', what they really meant is 'ROAD CLOSED'"So I stared in awe for a minute, then turned around and let GPS reroute me to a new street, where I saw this off to the side: 

And this in front of me:

 And I thought to myself, "is that... is that a car that tried to make it through?"  So I took a closer look:

And yes indeed, it is a car who tried to drive through, despite the Road Closed signs we all had to drive around.  I hollered to the fellow you can see wading out there to see if I could do anything to help, but he hollered back that they'd already called for help.

So I took a photo of the one happy thing I could see, this sweet little sunflower just soaking up the water, and again went on my merry way, hoping GPS could lead me in a water-free direction, as I was already 20 minutes late.

Alas, this is what I came to next:

And then about a 1/4 mile down the road, this:

I thought it was silly that this was the least amount of water I'd seen on the road so far, but which had the best precautionary devices around it.  But then I saw that red sign sticking up (sorry, I know it's tiny and that you can't really see it) but it's a high water mark measurement sign, and it goes clear up to 7 feet.  Which means that this area with only about a foot of water at this moment, gets dangerously deep.  Then I was grateful for the precautions.

 Finally, on the 4th try, I made it to work, only 30 minutes late.  At 3:30pm (five hours later) I still saw things like this on the way home:

And while I didn't take this photo (it was on the news website), the address put it only 4 or 5 blocks away from our house.  Poor little guys must have taken a wrong turn or two...

 At 5:00 I picked Benjamin up from work and told him all about my adventures and how awesome the flooding all looked, and yada yada yada, and did he want to go for a drive and see it all?!?!!?  So for the next 30 minutes I told him all about what he was about to see as we drove... and then we saw this:

 That Same field that was completely flooded this morning was now completely dry, as were all the roads.  Benjamin was a little disappointed that we drove around for so long without actually getting to see all the things I'd told him about, but by this point the sun was shining gloriously through the clouds and everything was so green and lush and incredibly gorgeous that it made the trip worth it!

Now I guess I understand why they don't put drains in the roads, because within 8 hours the earth takes care of all the excess water all by itself.