Monsoon season

Apparently, it's monsoon season for Colorado.  We have had nonstop afternoon and evening thunderstorms since Thursday.  It has rained and poured and lightninged and flooded and hailed, oh has it hailed.  The storms usually start off with a gust of wind, crazy cloud to ground lightning so I can't go out and cover my tomatoes, then hail, then heavy, heavy rain.  Today there's just enough thunder that I'm afraid to go out to see what happened to my garden during yesterday's hail. Thursday, both Boulder and Denver had downtown floods due to extremely heavy rainfall.  The burn area from last year's fire had a few mudslides, but no one was hurt. 

Every time it rains, my garage gets about an inch of water in the bottom and I get the pleasure of sucking it out with a shop vac in hopes of fighting mold possibilities.  The problem is, it actually comes in from our neighbor's garage and neither of us have permission to do anything about it because our HOA won't let us and when they try to fix it, they fail, and say, "Garages are not guaranteed to be dry, so please keep your belongings off the ground."  So, everything we own is on pallets, our boxes are up on wood, but it doesn't matter.  I don't want my stuff sitting in pools of water.  I don't want my storage items to be moldy or water stained.  It just makes me mad.  Of course you all know that they run the sprinklers every night, regardless of how much it rains.  It's good to know that they are sprinkling my garage.  I pay for the water, I pay them to do it, I clean it up.  Oh the life of a renter. 

Last night, before sucking the water out of my garage, I was driving home and saw the most beautiful mammatus clouds.  Because I can't seem to pick which pictures are the best, I'm only going to show one of them and save a few for next time.

Mammatus clouds at sunset.  They get their name from mammary glands and appear on the underside of the anvils of thunderstorms. 

From Thursday's storm alone. 

I wonder how much more water there'd be if I hadn't already done this every day for the last four days.  Las tnight, this much water filled that shop vac half way.

I've taken to propping it up and going inside to hang out for a while, then coming back and manually doing the rest.