You see these little flaps on my head?  No?  Maybe your web camera isn't on.  Right here, behind my ears.  Still, no?  Huh? I thought I felt gills sprouting back there.  My mistake.

There should be.  Since it started raining around 3 am on Friday, we, in Navarre proper, have had 7.52 inches of rain.  That's in just over 76 hours.  Everything is wet.  The world smells damp and musty.  The electric box alarms are blinking and honking all over the neighborhoods.  I'm amazed we still have cable, phone, Internet, and electric. 

Last night's storms boiled up around 10:45pm and just kept forming over us, and then formed a long line of thunderstorms that trained over us for hours.  The hardest rain coming after midnight.  Mercy.  It sounded like I had a tin sheet roof!

I had to get up several times last night to turn off the rainfall rate alarm on my weather system.  It doesn't even THINK of beeping me out of slumber until we hit a rainfall rate of over 8.5 inches per hour. 

The rain was so bad this weekend that the local critters are using the road as high and dry ground.  I haven't seen the local bear and cubs yet, but she'll pull them out of the cedar swamp with far less rain than this.  While out driving yesterday, we came across this menacing beastie. 

He put on quite the show up against a large truck.  He and hit little friends were hanging out on the road, in the middle of the road.  Maybe it was his turn to play crossing guard, or maybe he lost a bet.  Anyway, after we got him home and put him in a large plastic drinking cup so he could travel North via Skype and freak out the cousins, HE starting dropping babies in the cup.  Huh, who knew?

The creepy critter clicked and snapped away every time you passed the counter in the darkened bathroom to go down the hall.  (Where we banished her to until the rain let up enough to put her back in the ditch.) Icky little mud bug.  You'll be happy to know that she and her little spawn are free again. 

Now if I can just get all the frogs out of the garage.  They're frogs, for crying out loud!  They're supposed to LIKE the water. 

Sigh.  My family up North joke that I'm living in a Mutual of Omaha world.  Pretty much.

Guess what?  It's going to rain today.  I know, how shocking.

It's better than the western Caribbean.  Hurricane Earl shifted further to the west last night and is predicted to become a major hurricane.  He should take a turn to the north later today or tomorrow thanks to a trough pushing off the East coast.  However, he may have gone far enough west to set sights on NC or further up the coast.  Time will tell.  Until he actually turns North, anyone is fair game.

Even if he missed a land strike altogether, the rip current risk is unbelievably high along the entire Eastern seaboard.  I was shocked to see so many people out in the water on the tv news.  Ridiculous!

We too are still at red flag.  Although I don't foresee many people going out in this weather anyway, sans the surfers.  Some day we will make it back outside to the sunny warm beaches!

Have a great day everyone.