Tornado Warnings and The Great Mud Tsunami

Last year we had the haboob. This year, we have the Great Mud Tsunami of 2012!

West of our neighborhood is a new development going in. It is going to be beautiful with enormous homes when it is complete, but for now it is just a big dirt field. It was fine before they started working on it, but now that it is smoothed off the dust blows constantly and (as we recently found out) the mud comes POURING into our neighborhood when it rains.

The first rain was bad enough. It poured pretty heavy for a couple of hours and when we woke up the next morning it looked like a mud elf had come in and replaced all of our asphalt streets with dirt ones! It was absolutely the craziest thing. Our poor neighbors down the street got the worst of it, and actually had to use shovels to get the mud out of their grass.

As you can imagine the neighborhood threw quite a fit, and the City of Lubbock came in and told the new developer he had to implement some form of storm water plan.

Enter hay bales.

That's right. He decided that putting hay bales in front of the spots the mud had washed in would prevent any further damage. Hmm. Okay.

This past Saturday we had another crazy dust storm. The hay bales caught some of the dirt but what the developer did not realize was that the sand completely packed the hay bales and they would no longer be able to filter water.

On Sunday things got pretty scary -- we were in a tornado warning and the storm was right on top of us. Even worse, it was even closer to the barn, which scared me to death! Rob and I loaded up the puppies and headed to Nana's storm shelter. I have had my Harry Potter closet prepared for weeks incase of such an occurance, but of course when the time came I panicked so off we went.

We went into the storm closet for a while, but thankfully the tornadic activity stayed a couple of miles south.

We were just about to drive back home when Mom called yelling, "The hay bales have broke! They hay bales have broke!" Not something you hear every day :)

And broke they had. Water was pouring into our neighborhood like a raging river. Literally. We had water standing all the way up to people's steps on their front porches. It was crazy! Hay bales were actually floating down the street!

Rob and I had to drive through 2ft of water on the way home and when we awoke the next morning we saw what we knew was inevitable --- with the water had come the mud. Everywhere the streets were once again covered. They are still working to clean it up, but thankfully the developer has implemented much more reliable sources of storm water prevention.


Hopefully there will be no more tornadoes OR mud tsunamis anytime soon!

Summertime :)

First Bloom of the Year -- It's beginning to look a lot like SUMMERTIME!

Backyard Reno Update

It was just over a month ago that I posted about the awesome plan we created for our own little backyard oasis in the middle of West Texas.

Was it really only a month ago? It seems like this has been going on f.o.r.e.v.e.r.

I guess its partially my own fault... I tend to have a little bit (okay, maybe a lot) of an obsessive personality, so tend to throw myself into whatever things I am doing at the time until they become all-consuming. It is being all-consumed with too many things at once that oftens leads to a migraine, but that's a whole other post all together.

Over the past month we have made quite a bit of progress on the yard. Still no hot tub delivery, but we spent one weekend cutting out grass, leveling the yard and building concrete forms, the next actually pouring the concrete and setting pergola posts, the next building a flowerbed out of retaining wall block and finally this past weekend we were busy beginning construction on the hot tub pergola.

Wow. No wonder we have seemed so busy! On the plus side, my tan is already looking quite stellar (at least compared to how ghostly white I was before!)

Here are some pics of the progress so far!