LOL, oh sheesh!

LOL. Beyond necessary. I'm not surprised. I'd already read that Miami schools had to cancel classes because the roads to their campuses were under water. Let's hope things get better before they get any worse. The news out of Arkansas and Missouri is bad too. I mean, not 1993 bad, maybe not yet 2007 bad but maybe it is getting there.

Paula--thank you for the new colorful expression to add to my colorful expression repertoire!!!

I hope you can see this video. This is the road DH normally takes to work. This was Sunday. It is nothing compared to Miami, or the blizzard, but kind of hits close to home. 76th and Mingo.

Our friends who just got back from being snowed in by the blizzard in Kansas said her dad lost cattle in the blizzard. The images coming out of the region, with dead cattle lying on the ground, are just heartbreaking.

Amy, I hope that water is receding. That's too much water.

Y'all need to quit hogging the water up there and let the dry parts of southwestern, southcentral and southeastern OK have some....but not too much.

I'd rather be too dry, which we are, than too wet, which most of y'all are. It is a much simpler task to irrigate a dry garden than to try to get rid of excessive rainfall standing in a garden. The Drought Monitor Map, when it is released in a few hours, ought to look great for Oklahoma.

Here's the most recent rainfall maps:

2017 Year-To-Date Rainfall Map

For most of you, it has been the last 30 days that have produced amazing (or amazingly excessive) rainfall:

Rainfall: Last 30 Days Expressed As A Percentage of Normal

And here is what it looks like in inches:

Rainfall Map in Inches: Last 30 Days

As always, these are official rainfall amounts recorded at the OK Mesonet stations, and your actual rainfall may vary considerably from what has been recorded at the Mesonet stations in your region.

Usually April, May and June are rainy months, so let's hope the pattern breaks for a little while so y'all can dry out a bit before the typical May and June rainfall occur.

I'm hopin'! That's what Garry said yesterday Dawn, about the early amounts. . . with it being only May 3, he hopes what we've gotten is just an early May, rather than the prelude to May. Porter is Wagoner County's mesonet station, but it's 20-25 miles or so southwest of us (In fact, I've never been to Porter.) The Tahlequah station is actually closer to us. . . and that rainfall is a closer reflection (we're on the very eastern-most edge of Wagoner Cty right across the river/lake from Cheokee Cty. We were driving back from the vet's yesterday, amazed at the water on either side of 169, and then on the Whitehorn roadsides, and I asked GDW if it was normally like this (because 2 of the 3 years I've lived here, it's been like this, only worse in 2015, of course) and he said no. Good to know. Thanks for the links.

Saw the video, Amy. . . looks like here. . . wish we could bottle up this water for when it gets dry. (No, don't have rain barrels here. .)

I don't have rain barrels either, Nancy, to my regret. But I noticed the kiddie pool without holes was full of water, so dipped my watering can in to water potted up plants and the green house. But it needs to be emptied or the mosquitoes will take over.

I worked for the ranch 7 years, and twice during that time the Caney flooded. The property was shaped kind of like the "bottom" of TX with all that border being the Caney. I believe it flooded once before I worked there, so probably 3 times in 10 years. There was a low spot on a near by road that probably flooded more often.

I haven't been down the road in the video since then, but that is Bird creek and it crested Sunday or Monday.

I liked "what the french toast", too.

Nancy, We moved here following prolonged drought that really still was an ongoing drought. The drought continued for another couple of years. We had a lot of dry years, a couple of kinda wet years and then flooding in 2007. It was incredible. It was unreal. We thought we'd never see that sort of thing again. Water, water everywhere and all that. The last time the flood had been so bad here was, I believe, 1980, and I believe that was its first really big flood ever in modern times. So, you know, it seemed logical to think we wouldn't see that sort of flooding again. People flocked both to the Red River bridges and to Lake Texoma to view the mass of water. A lot of people took tiny children so they would have a chance to see it----in case it never happened again in their lifetime. Ha. The joke was on them. We had the Red River and Lake Texoma's 3rd big flood ever in our area in 2015, and also its 4th, 5th and then I believe its' 6th in the fall. We thought that was our river flood quota---all filled up, never gonna see that again. And we didn't. Until 2016. (sigh) You know, a once-in-a-lifetime, or twice-in-a-lifetime flood event isn't quite so impressive if it happens 3 or 4 times in one year. We had multiple river flood events in 2016, and I am officially over it all.

I absolutely hate crossing over the Red River I-35 bridge between Love County, OK, and Cooke County, TX, when the water is so high that you feel it hitting against the bridge roadway. I'd rather go all the way to western Love County and cross the Tayovayas Bridge there when the river is high because that span sits so much higher above the river bed than the I-35 bridge does. The wide raging river is a more incredible sight further west, but you're higher up and so it somehow feels safer.

I don't like any flooding at all, but we sure seem to have had a lot of it in the last 10 or so years. If it isn't in one part of OK, it is in another. In some horrible years, like 2007 and 2015, it is almost everywhere. Any more, it seems like we swing from drought to floods back to drought again, though maybe that is nothing new. Growing up in Texas, we had this old saying "it takes a flood to end a drought" and I never gave it a whole lot of thought because Fort Worth didn't flood often. I came to understand that phrase a lot more after moving her.

Amy, You could put Mosquito Bits or broken up pieces of a Mosquito Dunk in the kiddie pool and that will take care of mosquitoes. I imagine the stores soon will sell out of both products, but I usually see them in the pest section of stores like Lowe's and Home Depot. The active ingredient is Bt 'israelensis', and as a bonus, if you have fungus gnats. a little bit of Mosquito Bits dissolved in water in a watering can and used to water the soil containing fungus gnats will bring them under control too.

On the news yesterday, they were talking about the giant flood mosquitoes we often see after floods. I never knew they had a name. They're called gallinippers, and when you first see them you think they are mosquitoes and then you convince yourself that they aren't mosquitoes because they are so big that they cannot possibly be mosquitoes. Well, they are real. I have a feeling some of y'all may be seeing some of them soon. We had them in both 2015 and 2016, but they didn't last as long in 2016 because the rain stopped in June and the flooding slowly dried up.

Gallinipper Mosquitoes

I don't think we'll have them down here this year unless they like to bathe and lay their eggs in dust.

Dawn

Fun post, Dawn. . . and informative! I will hope the gallinippers don't show up, of course!

Yikes! Thinking about those dunks. I have some, er, somewhere.