it's raining, it's pouring

Here is my post about the storm that ruined our computer (I copied most of this from an email I sent to the family, so feel free to skim through).
Before this huge storm we had already been having really crazy weather here. A week earlier on Friday (May 30th) there was a tornado about an hour north of us, then on Tuesday (June 3rd) there was another one about 20 minutes south of us. Both tornadoes leveled some homes and a historic bridge was destroyed. All week the weather was alternating between intense thunderstorms and super hot humidity. The thunderstorms out here are amazing; I've never seen anything like them in Utah. It's amazing to see so much water pouring down all at once. Just a walk to the mailbox and back leaves you drenched. Also, the thunder lasts forever. During some of these bigger storms there's almost a constant rumbling with intermittent louder claps that rattle the windows.
This morning we woke up to yet another thunderstorm around 5:30 AM. It continued all morning and there is flooding all over the place. Eric spent the morning at the house of some friends in our ward helping them move everything out of their basement while the girls and I watched the water rise in our backyard and up over the sidewalk in the front. Apparently we are at the top of the worst of the flooding; on the news the town just south of us is totally flooded with water levels nearly up to the roofs of some of the homes. It finally stopped raining a little after noon and the news is reporting that we received anywhere from 6-12" just today! We don't have a basement so we didn't have to worry about flooding, but while I was taking some pictures outside a lightning bolt hit a telephone pole right behind our house which ruined the network card (which gives us access to the internet) on our computer.
This first picture was taken at the intersection nearest our house during a break in the rain. At this point it's still pretty early in the morning and larger vehicles still made it through without trouble. As you can see the water is already over the sidewalk at the corner. Later in the day people were playing in the water and it came up to a man's chest when he stood in the middle of the intersection (we discovered that many Indianans either don't know that flood water contains raw sewage or else they just don't care).
I was taking a few videos in our backyard and is the video I took right after lightning wiped out our internet (but I didn't know about the damage until I came back inside). I can't get the video to turn the right way, sorry.


Eric was trapped at our friend's house where the water in the street had risen up to the mailboxes. After the lightning struck behind our house some of our lights didn't work. I called Eric and he told me where the box was to flip the switch. It took me a couple tries to figure out which switches to flip, but I finally figured it out and continued playing Candy Land with Madilyn. I didn't receive any more phone calls and I was getting impatient for Eric to get home. A little while later someone started pounding on our front door. It was Eric, he had tried to call me but our house is kind of a dead zone so my calls don't always get through. Eric was sure that the lightning had damaged some wires or something and I wasn't answering because I had been electrocuted and was laying in a puddle of water in our garage! He ran the 2-3 miles to our house to make sure everything was okay.