Scary storm --

When I left work today it was absolutely POURING down rain!   It was like trying to drive with a fire hose pointed at your front window.  It was next to impossible to even see the road! 

This is from a video taken in a news car.  That's exactly how it looked!

Turned out that right at LSU there was almost 9 inches of rain in only two hours!   That pink spot is right at the place where Nicholson and Burbank split -- right where I almost got smashed.

That pink circle is where the worst of the storm was happening - right at LSU. 
(We live at that point just under the "P" in "Prairieville.")

We were all driving very slowly, but at one point the cars in front of me slowed to a full stop and a van came up behind me and very nearly crashed into me!  They slammed on their brakes and slid over to the left into the oncoming lane!  They came VERY close to getting smashed themselves!  Wow --   THAT was scary!!   I'd have liked to pull off the road but there was nowhere to go that was safe.  Good I didn't because in another few miles I drove out of the storm.

It's only slightly more than 10 miles from my office to the house, but when I got within a couple miles of home I just drove out of the rain.  So as soon as I got home, I ran out and fed the horses so they'd come on into the barn, and they were comfortably in their stalls when the storm got to us.  I closed Lizzie in her paddock.  Then since she couldn't go back out to the pasture, neither did Duke.  So thankfully I didn't have to worry about them getting hit by all the horrendous lightning strikes (the news report said 218 major strikes in that small round area in that picture above).  It really was frightening.  Even the dogs (who are not storm phobic) were nervous.  Boo hid in a corner away from the windows, Rocky tried to stay right next to me, and Joey climbed UNDER all the blankets in his bed and wouldn't come out until it stopped! 

On the weather report this evening, the TV station reported that their building had been hit by that lightning.  And one of the chemical plants just south of here caught fire, too.  They haven't identified the cause yet, but they're thinking that it was probably caused by lightning as well.  Believe me, it was scary. 

They also showed on that news report that not long after I drove through LSU, the rain was so heavy that it actually flooded there!  

Well, now that I've watched the weather report and heard that it's going to be perfectly fine by morning, I'm going to go ahead and go to bed.  Whew!