Only rain, rain, and more rain here (so far), but they say it could get worse. We were at 5.2" as of the 10 o'clock news, although the Mesonet doesn't show that. We had heavy rain last night and the Mesonet only recorded .17 at the station. We still have power, but have wet floors in our bunkhouse and our yard looks like a lake. It is raining faster than the water can flow downhill. Our neighbor's brother just came to his house to pick up a truck so they could go move a trailer that was in danger of floating away. Al and I went to Walmart just before dark and I got soaked just getting back to the car. It was dark by the time we left WM and I could barely see to drive home because of the heavy rain. We sat in the parking lot for a few minutes, but were afraid not to come home because they sometimes close our road because of high water. I didn't drive over 30 mph all the way home and there was a lot of water standing in the road in many places. It looks like we still have hours of rainfall headed our way and possible some sever weather tonight.

We're on a hill too. Good thing since as of 11:pm we have received 3.1 inches. Our daughter and family left here about 5 to return to Tulsa and had a scary experience on 82 north of Tahlequah. The van rocked side to side and then back and forth. When they pulled into a gas station a few minutes later, the clerk asked, "How did you get here? There was a tornado down that way." Luckily not a large one.

We're safe. But it would be a chore to get out. Low water bridges on most exits are impassible.

Had to empty the rain gauge at 5". It's been windy, but we seem to be intact.

We are covered in snow and more coming. The wind is horrible. I got my beets carrots and greens covered and hope for the best. I expect to be shut in 2 or 3 days. Since I just moved yesterday and found a box of seeds AND got a new dehydrator from my kiddos I will be fine and warm.

Just shy of 6 inches here and still raining. It's a good day to clean closets. Hope everyone is safe.

Rain gauge is full , but I'm not going out to empty it. Pastures have water flowing everywhere. Got a few extra lakes out there in the low areas.

We've gotten about 6 inches here. All creeks are bank to bank but not over , yet!!! It sleeted most of the morning but now I think it's a mix of rain and sleet. Hope the ice stays away, with this wind we would all be in the dark sitting by the fireplace.

i think my dogs have become part of the couch. Ha ha

everybody stay warm and dry. Have another day before this storm gets moved on out.

Just crazy, isn't it? I've been worried about a lot of people and a lot of stuff. George, I'm glad you're okay.

What I hate the most is all this cold and wind (gosh, the wind!) but no snowfall to enjoy.

I hate this rain and am finding it hard to find one good thing to say about it. It isn't like we needed more rain.

Yesterday we hit a lovely and muggy, though cloudy, 77 degrees and it felt like a morning in mid- to late-May. What a treat to have a 77-degree December day! Today, Winter found us. Ugh.

Obviously, the cold and rain were late to arrive down here and our rainfall total is not impressive compared to the rainfall a lot of you have had---only a bit over 4", but I'm not complaining. We already had fairly saturated ground, so 4" really is too much, but we can't do anything but grin and bear it and wait for all of it to soak in or run off. Right now, most yards are just big lakes.

Flooding in general is minor in most parts of our County so far, and we only had one tornado warning yesterday, which scared a lot of people, but the radar-indicated rotation did not put a tornado down on the ground, so all's well that ends well. However, strong winds have brought down some trees and such, and the town of Marietta had a major power outage that lasted several hours today. We are far enough south that our electricity comes up from the Thackerville area, not down from the Marietta area, so we never lost power here in our neck of the woods.

We have a new home weather station (not a big fancy one, just a little one that reports the data to the house using WiFi) out in the yard and the rain gauge empties itself. Woo hoo! I no longer will have to run outdoors in a big storm to empty out the rain gauge before it can overflow.

It has been a lazy, sleepy day here---I did not have the energy/desire to clean closets or anything (all the closets but one got cleaned up/reorganized on previous rainy days), but tomorrow I might clean out and reorganize the pantry. Once Christmas is over and we've given away tons of salsa, peppers and jelly, the pantry empties out a lot and I have a chance to restore some sense of order to it and that orderliness lasts until the canning frenzy begins the following summer.

Y'all be careful out on the roads in all this ice and snow.They say a little snow may find us down here tomorrow, but it is likely to amount to very little if we get any at all. I'm okay with that. Our firefighters were out for hours yesterday working traffic accidents on the highways, and it was much the same for the last 3 or 4 days (even before the rain started), so we'd like for it to stay quiet here for the next few days. Quiet is good.

it's a great time to take naps

Up to 9 inches by now. I haven't been out of the house except for a short trip to the freezer in the shop about 10 am.

Glad to see you all. Hope George is still OK, over 15 inches in Tahlequah? Stay safe!

Not sure just how much snow we got here in the middle of the Tx Panhandle as the horrible wind (up to 65 mph gusts and 50 mph sustained) moved it all around. What was in one place last night wasn't in the same place this morning when I got up. Thank goodness the wind has laid and the sun is shining brightly!! Haven't looked out at the pastures yet to see if there was enough grass stubble to catch and hold any of the snow - sure hope so, though.

It had been so warm, Kim, that I had been busy outside a lot. Then, along came this icky cold stuff and ruined that, so I'm stuck inside (like everyone else) with bored cats and bored dogs. Everyone but me is getting cranky, and if they stay cranky long enough, I may join them.

We are up to 6.25" of rain now, helped along by an inch or so of sleet and snow that fell in the early morning hours and caused us to have an early morning wakeup call from our fire pagers when people started sliding off the interstate and crashing into one another, etc. I was hoping to sleep in, but that didn't happen.

All the precip has moved on north and east so we are just wet. muddy, gloomy, etc. but at least nothing else is falling, and the ground temperatures were so warm that I think the snow and sleet will melt pretty quickly, though our air temperature has dropped to 31.

All the news out of eastern OK with all the flooding is just really bad. I hope everyone is safe, dry and warm and stays that way. I saw on the news this morning that they were trying to rescue 14 people in or near Westville from a house surrounded on all sides by water. I expect there will be a lot of that sort of thing the next few days. Who'd expect to see a historic crest on the Illinois River near Tahlequah in December? We might expect it in spring.

Amy, I hope George, Dorothy, Carol and our others in NE OK check in sometime today so we know they are okay. The Red River here is a slow lazy river today compared to what is happening in NE and E OK. Our flooding will be teeny-tiny, eeny-meenie and minor and theirs is/is going to be massive and epic.

I wonder if Larry is building an ark? He could take two of each kind of plant, instead of animals. We are gardeners, after all, though it is hard to garden with everyone's gardens either frozen or under water.

Mary, Y'all have too much snow and too much wind. Please keep it there and don't send us any more. (grin) I'm jealous that you've got sunlight. I hope we get some sunshine soon. I can tolerate cold weather just fine as long as the sun shines.

The kitties are amusing themselves by sitting by the windows and watching all the goldfinches and cardinals (and miscellaneous other birds) at the bird feeders. For the cats, watching the birds seems pretty entertaining. When the cats are outside, the birds stay away from the feeders until the cats all have gone indoors. Today, no cats outside, no problems for the birdies except it is danged cold.

As of Saturday morning, I had tons of green herbs in the garden and lots of little perennials and reseeding annuals had sprouted. Now they're lying under a thin carpet of sleet and snow.

Dawn

It seems I put the greenhouse up in a low spot. There is about an inch of standing water/muck to walk in. What a mess. The rest of the yard is about the same. We dumped 5" from the rain gauge and another 2.5 today, part of which was sleet. I live near Bird Creek, in Owasso. They've had to rescue a couple of people who drove into water about a mile from me. I was shocked to see 76th St N was underwater yesterday at Mingo. This area was recently widened and raised, but not far enough. Of course it is much worse down by Tahlequah and where they are releasing water from dams. DH is on vacation, at least I don't have to worry about him driving. Stay safe.

Yeah. Thanks goodness for the xmas vacations. I got out last night to p/u matt set for needy and it wasn't too bad. WINDY, tho. I just got back from the store a few min ago and it was sludge/snow & ice. It'll be awful by tomorrow.

Still, we didn't get hit hard as most of the state. Over the last month I've come to appreciate having 4wd option.

I'm wondering how Dixondale is doing with those onions and if we'd be better off ordering from somewhere else. New stuff for me. Gotta have onions this year and my seeds were viable. So..

bon

I don't know about Carol but we got over 10" We had a river again but with the work we had done on the yard most of it went in the swale where it was supposed to go!!

thank goodness

We are OK here. I checked in on the 'post-Christmas weather' thread. The pictures of Missouri just look terrible, so we feel blessed. Of course, the people below these full dams are going to have trouble now, because that water has to be released.

Is it just me or is talking about flood and tornados at Christmas a little strange?? I will say a prayer for all the people dealing with ice, flooding and tornado damage. I've been through it all and it is bad news anyway you look at it.

It is very strange. Snow ice sleet cold we are used to but all the other is odd. I pray everyone is safe and warm. Too many power outages around me.

Amy, I've been watching the news and wondering if y'all were floating away up there. Poor Tahlequah (and everyone downstream and close to the flooding rivers). My greenhouse is in sort of a low spot too and I wasn't worried about it because we hardly ever get too much rain here. This year is the exception, and I hope we don't have another one like it anytime soon. The water isn't too bad now, but it was an issue in May.

Bon, I imagine Dixondale is fine right now. They are down in the winter garden area of Texas where lots of crops are grown because the weather generally is ideal.....not too cold and not too wet. I looked at their recent weather, and they have had good autumn rainfall but nothing lately and not too much rain or too much cold. Let's hope that doesn't change. They had a lot of rain back in May, but that was a long, long time ago in agricultural terms, and the onions they'll be shipping us in a few weeks were only planted recently. They are blessed with very sandy soil too. So far this week it seems like the most rain-like stuff they had was fog or maybe some mist, but they have a 20-30% chance of rain late in the week. Maybe it will rain and make their onion plants grow. They do not get much rain down there most years. I'd love to live and garden down there, except for my tomato obsession---sandy soil tends to have nematode issues so that might be a problem.

Carol, I'm glad y'all aren't below the dams. All the news looks so grim, and I hate to think of all the folks who are having homes, businesses and personal property threatened or damaged or destroyed.

Stockergal, It does seem weird. There's been so much odd weather in the last week---and don't forget the earthquakes. I've never seen such odd Christmas weather here and don't know if we should blame it on El Nino or whatever.....it is just bizarre. Add in the earthquakes and we have had a fruit salad mix of all kinds of strange happenings. There should be a special name for weather systems that give you a blizzard, ice storm, snow, sleet, rain, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, hail and massive flooding all within a week's time or less.....but some folks would just shrug and say "that's Oklahoma weather for you". It isn't often we get to have all four seasons in the same week, but I think we just had that happen here. The wind has been crazy too....I guess that counts as March or April weather.

Kim, I hope you have power. Folks in town here lost it several times over the weekend but out here in the sticks our power never went out. I believe the parts of town that lost power have OG&E and those of us with the local electric co-op didn't lose our power. That seems a somewhat common thing around here.

A warming trend starts tomorrow and we're expecting sunlight here. Woo hoo! That big yellow thing in the sky is going to return before we forget what it looks like.

I hope it starts drying up the ground. All our ponds and creeks are overflowing and the yard has gigantic puddles the size of ponds. If it wasn't so cold, the frogs would be overjoyed.

Dawn

We live on a hill so we are good. The greenhouse leaks though and not over the beds to water the plants, but over a storage cabinet. The chicken pen/lawnmower storage shed was built in a low spot so I imagine it had water running through it during the heaviest rain. No chickens now though. We haven't been out to check on it but will tomorrow.

The pictures of the Illinois River flood on facebook are heartbreaking. I think they said it crested at 30 ft. Old record was 27 in 1950. I will be tallying our yearly rainfall total soon. We've had 10.58 inches this episode.

We also have one of those weather systems that transmits to the house. It stopped working last summer during our dry spell. When Dh took it apart he found that a spider had built a web and glued the tipping cup down with web. So we sprayed it with repellent. It worked fine since.

Sure hope everyone is safe.

Dorothy, The photos of the flooding are heartbreaking, and the news of the flood-related deaths are even more heartbreaking.

I'm glad y'all are on a hill.

Why can't a greenhouse leak where it should and at least provide water for the plants instead of for a cabinet that doesn't need any irrigation? Mine hasn't leaked, but I have two big puddles....one outside of each doorway. After the ground dries up (if it ever does) I imagine we'll come back and put gravel or brick walkways or something there now, which likely won't divert the puddle water very far, but at least I'll be open to stand and open the doors without standing in 3" of water every day.

Thanks for the spider web tip. I'll keep that in mind if ours stops working. It is nice to have the self-emptying rain gauge. I appreciated not having to go out and pour out a rain gauge before it overflows.

The video on The Weather Channel from Missouri yesterday is just hard to look at. Seeing water covering roadways, swamping bridges, and rising around/through/into homes and other structures is just so sad. It looks as bad in some places as it did in 1993, which we watched in horror on the TV and never forgot. Flooding is such a slow-motion disaster and, as the water continues to rise and flow ever deeper into inhabited areas, there's nothing you can do except get out of the way. I admire all the effort so many people there have put into building temporary flood walls and levees, and some have done an awesome job with sandbags, but you never know if all those efforts will pay off. In this case, I hope they do. It is sad when levees fail and dams break and people who thought they were in a safe, protected area suddenly discover they are not.

With all our talk of our garden plans and what we'll be doing in the coming weeks and months, it is easy to forget that for so many people in the flooding parts of OK, AR, MO and elsewhere, there will be a whole lot of recovery ahead that will take months and, for some areas, years, and their garden plans are the last thing on their minds right now.

We are sitting at 77.7" of rain for the year, which is a number no one in our county ever dreamed would fall here. That is more than twice our annual rainfall of 38". Our previous record rainfall year was just a little over 59" and most people here doubted that record ever would fall....much less by such a huge amount. Ever since we built our house and moved here in the 1990s, I always wondered if we really and truly were far enough from the river to be safe from record flooding (apparently we are) and if our house was built high enough above the creek to be safe from flooding no matter how much rain Mother Nature dumped at one time (apparently it is). I guess there is some relief in that. Despite massive flooding around us, we never were in danger of water ever reaching the house, and our creek channeled enough rainfall that the road over our bridge never flooded. Still, I'm hoping we never see rainfall like this again. It really is too much. I suspect a lot of my spring bulbs and my perennial onions may not survive this winter's perpetually wet soils, and really, our soils have been waterlogged in every month of the year except July, August and September.

Our chicken coop has had minor erosion happen to the sandy ground beneath it and we need to fill in that area before rats and snakes or skunks or possums move in and decide to live underneath the chicken coop, but the building itself is fine. It just looks like a creek ran beneath parts of the coop as rain runoff created its own little channel along the west wall of the coop. I don't think it will be hard to fix, but instead of shoveling sandy soil back into the eroded areas, I think we'll use gravel.

Dawn

I wonder how Larry is doing.

I wish we'd hear from him. He has been on my mind too because I imagine he got about the same amount of rain that Dorothy got if not more. Hopefully he's just busy with family matters and the holidays.