Aug 8, 9 & 10

Aug 8th
It is a little after 10p.m. and we're in the basement of the clubhouse.  Some of us are in the locker room and the exercise/laundry area.  Others are upstairs watching the radar on television.  The reason we are here is because there is a severe thunderstorm approaching..
Somehow this seems like the way to end this day.  It started off with us getting ready for church and discovering that the battery in the truck was dead.  Looking around, we noticed that some of our neighbors hadn't left for church yet.  We called Barbara and asked if we could ride with her to church.  At first she misunderstood and thought we wanted her to take us to our church.  We explained that we would like to go with her to her church.  We did.
After church we fixed and ate lunch (spaghetti with Italian sausage), I plugged the charger onto the battery and then had a little rest before we both went to work in the afternoon.  Ella got off at 8pm and I got off at 9pm.
Now here we sit waiting for the storm.  It has started with quite a lightening show.

Aug 9th
We were at the clubhouse until the storm stopped at 3a.m.  An amazing amount of lightening throughout the storm.  Our power flickered off a couple of times but didn't stay off.  Ankeny, Johnston, Clive and the northern part of Des Moines lost power for several hours.  We measured 4 1/2 inches of rain in our gauge.
Cutty's lake overflowed.  I've not seen the water back up this high before.  (seems like I just said that a couple of days ago.)
The water washed a section of our road away.  It lifted the asphalt (1 lane wide and about 60 feet long) and just slid it off the road and folded it like a blanket at the edge of the lake.
The truck started so we went for a drive to let it charge the battery.  We drove up and around Saylorville Lake and stopped at the Prairie Flower fee booth to visit with some friends who work their.  When we got back into the truck it hesitated before it actually started so we drove into Ankeny to O'Rielly's Auto Parts and bought a battery (another $100 that I hadn't counted on).  We also did a little grocery shopping and I had one of our 100# LP tanks filled (another $70).  It has turned out to be extremely hot and humid so we'll spend the rest of the day in air conditioning.

Aug 10
We had another storm in the early A.M. which dropped another 5" of rain.  We did not go to the clubhouse last night and, frankly, we slept through most of it.  We went our and shot some video of the lake which has flooded over again, of course.  Ella just read something on her Blackberry that (written before this mornings rain) said that we are 18" short of being the wettest Summer on record for Des Moines.  We've already beat the record for August.  Well here are the videos.