Weird and Wacky Weather...

The last week or two around this place has been CRAZY! as far as the weather is concerned. We went all of July with little to no rain and SUPER hot temps (I think the highest the temp got was 116 and it stayed around there for a few miserable days...).

Well, fast forward a few weeks and welcome to the CRAZY! We have had the wildest rain storms. It has rained so hard we couldn't even see out our back door...

This puddle is over an inch deep already and it had only been raining about 5 minutes when I took this one...
Same with this one...luckily it didn't find it's way into our basement. When I saw this I thought for sure we were going to have flooding-PHEW!
This one washed all the dirt out of our lawn and made a nice mucky river flowing down our street. (Luckily we're at the top of our street and not the bottom)...
Oh, and just to mix things up a bit, we threw in an earthquake too. The earthquake's epicenter was down in VA, but we felt it here-freaked the girls out quite a bit, but we survived :D

It's hard to see in this pic that I took, but the 4 right-most (is that a word???) spires have blunt tops. About 3 feet fell off of each of them and the Temple workers told us they made holes in the roof of the Temple. Luckily it was still open for business (well, baptisms to be more specific)!
Then, for the grand finale...Hurricane Irene! It worked it's way all the way up the east coast, not wanting to leave anyone out. We were really fortunate during this storm (especially compared to some stories and pictures I've seen on the news). We were just out of the "Hurricane" range and were in the "tropical storm" range. It rained and rained for over 24 hours, I think the news put the total rain in our area around 6 inches. The wind was crazy, but luckily not as crazy as I was expecting. We did end up sleeping in the basement though because of tornadoes that were threatening our area.

The worst damage we had was broken limbs off of trees, but nothing major. We have some really OLD and really BIG trees in our yard and I must admit, I was really worried about one of them falling on our house or our neighbor's house. I am so grateful that didn't happen!

I raked all the limbs, branches and leaves into piles, I ended up with about 6 piles all over our front yard. The kids REALLY wanted to jump in the piles but I wouldn't let them, I know, I'm really mean. But to my defense, there were a lot of pointy, jagged sticks in all of them and I didn't want to end up in the emergency room...
Clean up, clean up...except there's not enough room in the garbage can, I still have one BIG pile left and 2 big tree branches to get rid of.
Phew-that's tiring just blogging about it. The hurricane was by far the most stressful, but I think it was because of the anticipation. We spent all of Saturday afternoon just waiting for it and wondering what was going to happen. It ended up being less of an event than the news channels were predicting (other than Steve's favorite weather blog, liveweatherblogs.com-they hit it right on the head like usual!) and we are so thankful for that! And let's hope the rest of the year will be a lot LESS eventful!