All day, the topic of conversation was the rain. It’s no wonder, for the last day and a half, that’s all we’ve seen around town. Heavy rain. Light rain. In between rain.
Lots of it.
And guess what the forecast is? More rain. At least through the middle of the day tomorrow. Then we may get a break and then…more rain.
When August rolls around and it is hot and dry, we should remember this rainy week in January. It will help to build up our water tables for later when we don’t have rainy weeks.
But as for now, it’s raining.
Lots of rain around here means lots of flooding in all the usual spots; low-lying areas that don’t drain as well (like over near Cedar Bluff on Cross Park). Turkey Creek in Farragut was way up, too, when I drove home this evening. You can always tell – when the water is near the road at the corner of Kingston Pike and West End Drive, that means we’ve had a bunch of precipitation.
I’ll tell you…I find it surprising – but it always seems to happen – when a driver gets caught in flooded waters. I figure if there are traffic barriers placed by local officials, there’s a reason! “Turn around. Don’t drown.”
The flooding isn’t surprising, though. We received our entire January average rainfall in a period of 48 hours. That’s just too much. There’s no where for it all to go.
Lots of rain also makes for a difficult commute when people don’t plan ahead. They leave the house at the usual time and don’t understand why the traffic isn’t flowing along at its usual pace. This morning, I saw a disabled vehicle along the side of the road on I-40 and that had everything slowed down.
Lots of rain also makes folks grumpy. We’re happier when we see the sunlight. Looks like we’ll have more sunny days when the weekend gets here.
As for now, it almost seems like the town has a collective case “Seasonal Affective Disorder” (SAD). I remember the topic came up over and over again in the 1990s tv show, “Northern Exposure.” It was discussed, for example, in the episode titled “Northern Lights.”
Lack of sunlight = SAD folks.
Anyway, it seems like people just need a little good news. Folks seem so bummed out right now that they missed the news that Knoxville is considered to be the second most happy place to work in a recent survey!
As for me, I’m not a huge fan of all the rain either. It’d be nice to get it in a smaller dose. I figure we need the rain (even if we could get it without the flooding).
Back when I was coaching baseball (and serving as a league official), rain was more of a pain.
When we were trying to decide whether or not we could play ball, there was often a fine line in making the decision. Obviously, if it rained a little bit yesterday and had stopped, we had plenty of time to get the fields ready for play, so we’d play. On the other hand, if we had experienced heavy rain for days, that was also an easy call. No ball.
But is was the in between stuff that made for the tough calls (and those were more frequent). If we had gotten a little rain, moms would assume we weren’t going to play (often we could). If we had just finished with a gully washer, the hard-core, play or practice all the time coaches would be ready to play ball.
Our decisions frequently involved some in depth inspection of the fields after the rain to see if it was safe to play and if we could do so without damaging the field. If we could guarantee both of those factors and if there was ample time to prep the fields, we’d play. That would make a lot of young ballplayers happy (and the mud was just an added bonus for them!).
Anyway, I’m glad I’m not making those decisions now. To me, now, rain is just rain.
So, just hang in there a few more days folks. It should be sunny by the weekend. And when Mr. Blue Sky comes out to play, we’ll all be cheery again.
JG
(Source: knoxnews.com)
Originally posted 1/15/2013
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