Who'll stop the rain?

Long as I remember
the rain been comin down.
Clouds of mystery pourin confusion on the ground.
Good men through the ages,
tryin to find the sun; And I wonder,
still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?
-- Credence Clearwater Revival
This was the view outside my backdoor.
This is the kids' picnic table. We have some drains in there that we kept digging out. From 2 to 2:50, I was sweeping water out of the back yard. Then, I picked up the kids - including getting Pickle early - and he and I swept the water out of the backyard for a couple of hours solid. It rained and rained and rained all day. Pickle went inside and got warm once Army of Dad was home. Then, AoD took over and we swept out water, dug out drains and emptied the wheelbarrow full of water over and over before I started getting hypothermic and came in. I was hallucinating. It was really pretty scary.

Debris washed down the tiers in our backyard. See the sandbox on the left there? Well, by the end of the storm tonight, it was over to the right by five feet. I thought my husband moved it. He thought I moved it ... it has about 40 pounds of sand in it. Neither one of us moved it. THAT gives you an idea of how powerful the water, just in our backyard, was.

Between our house and the next door neighbor's house was this river of water. This is where the water from the backyard was washing down the hill. We were sweeping the water out the back gate and down this hill. That is my neighbor's driveway in the background. This rain was something to see. Scary, scary stuff. I think just about every muscle in my body is sore after the constant sweeping of water out of the backyard, but all I could think was that we don't have flood insurance. From the news accounts, this is the worst rain in my town in 20-someodd years. Drought, schmout. This ought to bring up the lake levels for us. As for me, I'm exhausted and want to go to sleep. Flooded intersections like the one in the link were on the news. We drive this way several times a week. We watched the high-water rescue on Fox 4 tonight and I cried watching the rescuers grabbing a baby and several little children. One woman said she was sitting at the stoplight when the water just came up around them. There is a little dry creek there. Apparently, tonight, it wasn't too dry. This was all very scary. There is a road that leads out of our neighborhood. If you turned right, you were driving through high water. If you turned left and kept going straight, the road was blocked off with cones (of course, we saw douchebags driving around the roadblock). This was rain like we've never seen in the just about eight years we've lived here. I have aches where I didn't know I had muscles from the hours sweeping the rain out of our tiered back yard. But, thank the Good Lord, we didn't get flooded. Just listening to the news: there are reports of 10 inches of rain from a community just a few miles from us and eight inches from about 15 miles down the road. I believe it.