A Fine Day for Ducks!

Of course, now that the weekend has arrived (Melinda's long, 4-days off), the rain has arrived - rain that has not relented in 24 hours. At the moment (9am Saturday) it is raining about as hard as it ever has, resulting in "Lake Ketelsen" to form again between our house and the Fox River. Radar pictures show the end might be in sight in a few hours, but also show that to date, we're on the edge of having received 6" of rain. Anyway, all this rain is from a tropical depression from the Pacific that reached down to western Mexico yesterday. Today, of course, Hurricane Ike is blasting Texas and is poised to add moisture here tomorrow night into Monday, so I suspect Lake Ketelsen and the Fox will increase in size dramatically! Stay tuned!

UPDATE: It has continued to rain hard and 4 hours later the yard looks like this! I think the total rise in the river is about 10" or less, but with the shallow slope of the yard, the increase in area looks impressive. I do think the river is officially out of it's banks! The good news, if any, is that there is a lot less rain falling upstream in Wisconsin, so flooding will hopefully not be long-lived. The neighbor kids were out wading in the yard - I don't think the umbrellas keep you too dry when you are knee deep in water! Displayed is our current rainfall total as of 1300 - over 8"!

ANOTHER UPDATE...
The rain let up for a while, but now we're getting bands of showers again. During the time that it was mostly stopped, Dean noticed that one of the canoes was floating freely. This particular canoe was over half full of water, so we didn't think it would go anywhere - considering the waterfilled weight of the canoe. We were wrong! Dean noticed it, and we felt that we really did need to get out there and "save" the canoe! This was about the time the sun had already set - so we were faced with this task in partial darkness. We put on our shorts, our sandals, joined hands, and waded out into the flooded yard. After managing to get the canoe tipped over and onto one of the racks, Dean noted that the sail boat was also off the racks, and not tethered down! We managed to get that moved around and "beached" up on top of the row of canoes. We both agreed that the camp should give us a canoe for having saving saved two boats! While this update would have been better if we had some pictures to go with it, we didn't have the extra hands to make that happen. I guess that qualifies as our "good deed" for the day! We'll post some current pictures in the morning - who knows how high the water will be by then - yep, I'm more than a little worried...