We've had a little storm here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.
Actually, we're still in the middle of a little storm -- or, more accurately, storms -- around these parts.
This is the typically Midwestern understated way of saying "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!" We've already smashed the record for rain in a day . . . which has fallen in about four hours.
So far.
And in my part of town, we were lucky. There have been no rescuing people from houses in fire department boats, as there has been in northeast Omaha. There also have been no suspected tornadoes or baseball-size hail, as there have been north of town.
ABOUT 3 feet in the front of our garage got wet. So what -- it's a garage.
And nobody has had to rescue us with an airboat. That's something, at least.
I am, however, afraid to check out the basement.
Nighty night from windblown, hail-pocked, flooded Omaha. The College World Series starts at the end of next week -- let's hope there's something left for folks to visit.
UPDATE: Make that "smashed the record for rain in day for the month of in June." It was Omaha's fifth-highest all-time rain total for a single day.
I'm sure there must be at least a few reasons why someone actually might wish to live in the Texas Panhandle. This is not one of them.Those aren't boulders, and that's not a narrow grassy path through a lava field.
That's four feet of hail, with a gully carved through it by the runoff from another three inches of rain. That's not something the Amarillo-area chamber of commerce will want to be playing up as it tries to attract new residents.NOT THAT anyone would believe such a thing -- even about Texas.
Sure, everything's bigger in Texas. But 4 feet of hail from one storm? That's what the National Weather Service, the Texas Department of Transportation and a local sheriff say happened Wednesday in an area north of Amarillo when hail piled up in drifts so wide they cut off a major highway.
The National Weather Service office in Amarillo even posted a photo on its Facebook page, but that wasn't enough to convince skeptics.
"Serious do not think this is 100% hail!!!" commented one person.
"It's a lite dusting of hail on some damn rocks," said another person, referring to the image of a firefighter standing next to what could be taken for boulders.
"I can assure you we do not have big rocks like that in West Texas," Krissy Scotten, a spokeswoman for the weather service office in Amarillo, told msnbc.com.
WELL, at least that's something.