Water, water, everywhere!

In my last post I wrote about how we had done a project for our good friend and Pastor with his wife. Well yesterday we got to do a project with him while his wife is away. Although, the project that I wrote about in my last post was much more fun....
The weekend started out quite normally, we were up late Friday night so we slept in and we decided that we were going to go and have lunch with my Mom for her birthday and spend the afternoon with them and go to a neighbor's graduation open house together. We had gotten some rain off and on throughout the day, just before the open house it had rained quite hard for a while but let up in time to go and visit for a bit. It was in the back of all of our minds, how high the water must be getting in the rivers, K and I had just been out to the local lake and seen how high the water was getting there and we both wondered how high it was after the last week, but we still weren't prepared for Sunday.
It started to rain hard Sunday evening. B and I even ventured out in the rain to pick up another friend for music practice at church since she and her hubby weren't too thrilled at the thought of her out driving in the rain. We were surprised at how it was puddeling along the sides of the road, and how it seemed to be just pouring out of the sky.
There was a break in the storm and we looked out the church windows and saw a beautiful sunset. The sun was peeking under the storm clouds and in a hole in the clouds it there was a beautiful golden glow. We were all in awe of this spectacular show the Lord was giving us!
We awoke to more rain and storms during the night, again surprised at how strong this rain was and the claps of thunder. Our shih tzu woke me up a few times because he was afraid of the storm and the power went out at least once, maybe twice. We woke up late and had to hurry to get to church on time for Sunday School, and when we got there we met PM pulling a shop vac out of his van. Not a good sign. We had some issues with water in the basement at church before, but PM said that this was the worst ever. We planned to come back after church and work on clean up but we quickly found that it was more of a job than we were expecting. Water just came pouring back in as soon as we could get it cleaned up. We have gotten so much rain the water table is extremely high and water is coming in wherever it can. We have never had water in our basement and we had eight to ten inches Sunday afternoon. K and my Dad got a pump and emptied the basment out three or four times. They ran uptown to get a new pump (at first we were borrowing one from my Dad's work place) and in the half hour they were gone it filled up again. The lake in town was terribly flooded.
While we were cleaning up at church we got a call that PM's house now had water in the basement. They have a finished basement where the tv and the computer are so we hurried over there and spent hours trying to get ahead of the water with no end in sight. Finally about ten or so we quit for the night and have plans to go back and clean up the at least three inches that are standing on the floor now. There are stories from all over the area of water in basements that have never had water before, flooding, no power, and in some areas not being able to use the bathroom or drink the water. Thankfully the rain has stopped for now, but it sounds like we are in for more later in the week. Fun.