I took Typhoon down for about an hour tonight in the midst of probably the biggest storm that Phoenix has seen since I first stepped foot in Arizona. Most of the big stuff had moved through by the end of the 10 o'clock news (i.e. 10:30ish), which I caught the tail end of and reported 2.8 inches of rain downtown. I wouldn't be surprised if we had more than that in Tempe. Keep in mind, average annual rainfall for phoenix is around 7-8 inches. Since then it has been raining constantly. Power went on and off a few times (between 10:30-11), until finally it stayed off. Calling SRP yielded information that the outage was scheduled to be fixed, well, right now as i'm writing this - so they were a bit ahead of schedule which is nice. However, that hour was longer than the batteries on the server were going to hold out, per my experience. So I shut down the typhoon giving it time to gracefully close everything, instead of letting the battery run out.
The other cool thing is we've had some real lightning and thunder with this storm, like house rattling thunder - good stuff - except that people around here don't know how to turn off their car alarms in such situations. Oh, also I ventured out around 10:00 in search of a birthday card. Having good intentions, and having some fun driving on the wet roads, I made it to the entrance of Fry's and noticed it was blocked off and they were waving people by. Looking beyond I saw a fire truck near the entrance. Not a good sign, I later discovered this was because the roof had collapsed under the weight of the rain water. By this time I had two options - the most obvious was to make a U-turn and head back target and see if they were still open. However, there was a line of cars at the stoplight heading that way, mostly because half the street was covered in water leaving only 1 of 3 lanes un-flooded. So I decided after seeing that to just do a loop to avoid sitting at that light. My suspicion was that I'd find lines of cars at the next street. I was wrong, instead I found parts of the street completely flooded over, and later finding parts of the road with nearly 2 foot of water. Luckily this was for only a very short period of time, and I slowly followed other traffic through. Getting on the highway, the opposite direction was severely backed up - standing still would be the right word. Luckily the way I needed to go was fine. After investigation the freeway interchange was closed, causing the backup - not sure what happened there. After the adventure I decided it was best just to head for home.
In other news, and this will be brief given my tiredness, painted the master bedroom last saturday with Dan's help, and the ceiling in the living/dining room on sunday. This saturday will be painting of the living/dining rooms, and then scheduling of carpet installation. Woohoo!
There was a storm like that one of the summers you were back in KS during undergrad, but only one that I recall. Oh, it preceded by a huge dust storm too. For a while the dust was blowing and rain was falling. That wasn't very nice for my car. :)