This has not been a normal summer for us in South Florida and, in all truthfulness, it has been so long since I can recall a "normal" summer that I’ve quite forgotten what one is. Back in the early eighties normal was sunshine everyday with a guaranteed daily down pour which usually broke some time between noon and three in the afternoon...you know, that time of day when you're trying to leave the office for a quick bite of lunch or to run a lunch break errand?
For several years we’ve experience drought conditions and well below average rainfall and it seems that this summer has made a valiant attempt to rectify this discrepancy. So many dark, cloudy wet days that I find myself checking my feet to make sure they're not morphing into ones that match Donald Duck's.
This past week we had a real cloud burst, what we used to call in southern California; "A gully washer". Accumulated close to 6 inches in an hour. Half-way through the deluge our local weather station issued flood warnings. Well I guess better late than never.
Photo below...Just another ditch filled with rain water. Too bad there wasn't a duck floating around in it, would have made a cute photo.
Photo below...Remember how our neighbor across the street from us worked to clear the brush from some of his property ? Looks like he's got a nice mud hole right now...or lake. Don't think he's going to be running that bulldozer today !
Photo below...It's a bit hard to see, but the water is actually running off our neighbor's land, filling their ditch and flowing across the road into the ditch on our side of the street. Amazing how water seeks it's own level.
photo below...another view of the rain water run off. Notice the small rapids in the middle of the street ? They show up in the bottom right corner of photo below.
As I took these photos it was so dark outside that my camera insisted upon using its flash. Not sure that tiny flash helped to lighten the whole outdoors, but if it made my camera happy then why not?
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