Wedge revisited, a bit more wet this time
On Friday, I decided to walk to the Wedge for dinner. Opening the door, I discovered that there was quite a bit of rain coming down outside, but I didn't let that deter me. After all, it's just water, right?




About thirty steps outside, I realized that this rain was just a little bit more intense than I had initially evaluated. Undeterred, I trudged on... the rain was warm and felt nice, and there was little keeping me from getting drenched at this point, anyhow.

The Wedge is a little over two-and-a-half blocks away. At the start of the second block, the amount of water coming down got so ridiculously out-of-hand that I started laughing maniacally and couldn't stop. The absurdity was too much to handle gracefully, so the laughter came.

In the middle of the second block, the hail began. At first, I though pod seeds from trees were landing on me, but then there were speckles of white in the streets and on the sidewalk. By the time I reached the street the Wedge is on, the rain had dropped several degrees and the hail had turned the size of quarters and began to sting. Nobody was on the street, cars were moving along at scarecely 5 miles per hour- if that- and visibility was naught. So when I finally reached the doors of the Wedge, there was a crowd of people standing just inside the entrance, collected by the windows so they could watch the downpour. Upon entering, they applauded me- either for the foolish circus act or because I hadn't fallen to my death in the flood and onslaught of icy rocks raining down from the sky. Most likely the former.

The Wedge had mango seitan again- that rocked!

So I got my deli food and joined the crowd by the window. The hail had stopped, but the rain hadn't really let up at all yet. Not wanting to stand there eating by the doors, and figuring that there wasn't any manner in which I could get more wet, I decided to walk home. My underwear were already soaked through, so there wasn't anything dry left to salvage, and the Wedge's air-conditioning was making me cold, anyhow.

On the walk home, the route I usually take goes through a street which has a mild valley to it. Even though the sewers were not yet backed-up, this took me through collected rainwater that was well above knee-level. Now that the hail had stopped, some people were curious enough to walk out in the streets, mostly to see how deep some of the water was and if it, perhaps, was an okay time to go swimming. I rushed home to grab a camera:


Several cars here and on Lyndale was stopped mid-street when their engines became submerged.


The water-level had actually been a bit above the headlights before draining away.


This car was somehow floating! I tried to figure out how to make the camera I was using take a movie of the person that was pushing it around in the water with a single hand, but didn't get to it before it struck ground again.