It rained all night, and was still coming down hard when I woke up at dark-thirty this morning. I did decide to get back into bed (walking right into poor Pippa in the dark) hoping to fall back asleep, but didn't have any luck. While I was in the kitchen heating up water for my coffee, Pippa gently reminded me that she hadn't eaten since dinner, and if I didn't want her to starve before Sandy made her morning appearance maybe I could feed her. Which I did.  Though it was barely light a trio of wet but obviously hungry goldfinches were already clustered at the feeder.

More e-mails had gone back and forth from Andy to the law school (once I was actually registered the next problem occurred when the site showed that the lectures were "no longer available" despite there being icons for each one) and this morning I was actually able to see/hear Andy on my laptop. (Will not work on my iPad because that doesn't support the required Adobe Flash.)  Now we (meaning Andy) just need to see about downloading the actual textbook so I can do the actual reading for his lectures.

I ended up leaving to pick up Mom about 20 minutes ahead of schedule since I was ready; I figured that if she wasn't ready I'd just wait there, but it since my commute ended up taking about 20 minutes longer than usual due to the crappy weather conditions it worked out.  Last night I'd parked right next to the garage door knowing rain was predicted, so I didn't get too wet getting into the car. However <cue music> just as I pulled out of the driveway onto the narrow barely-one-lane private road there were two rather large branches, much too hefty to even think about driving over, that had come down during the night. So I had to get out into the deluge after all to drag them off to the side, and of course got quite wet. 

In case anyone is wondering, I did look on the back seat and floor for an umbrella, but when I didn't see one I figured it was safe and sound (and in this case useless) in the trunk. Had a I simply thought to check the handy-dandy pocket behind the driver's seat I would have had much better luck...

Because of the heavy downpour the roads were having difficulty draining and much of the time were underwater (definitely hoped to avoid hydro-planing after the recent news segment of an amazing rescue caught on video when a truck hydro-planed, flipped, and the kids were trapped underwater) and it did not bode well that the dark gray sky continually got blacker and blacker as I drove along. My visibility was very poor (at times only a couple of car lengths), and at least three times vehicles (including school buses) passing through flooded lanes next to me sent up such intense amounts of water that even at high wiper speed I had no view for a heart-stopping couple of seconds. 

But by the time I went upstairs to get Mom and we came back down the rain was letting up, our drive back to the house was not harrowing, and upon our arrival it had actually stopped raining (no complaints about that!)  Of course given the weather I had just driven through I had no way of knowing that that would be the case, and was so stressed about having the same sort of drive back that instead of wishing Mom a Happy Birthday and giving her a hug I simply rushed her out the door. Bad, bad, bad!

We loaded up Andy's van, dropped Pippa off at the Preston Country club for Pets (she is one of those rare dogs who is not happy about going for rides in the car so we had to coax her in, but seemed excited when she realized where she was) and than got on 95 heading to NY.

We had an uneventful drive up, with no real rain to speak of. After this morning I was more than a bit worried Andy might have a difficult drive. There were the usual slowdowns once we got close to the city, but we found the hotel (we're right near Carnegie Hall) and settled into our rooms. (Sure hope Andy & Sandy's room is bigger than ours; if we eat too much for dinner we might not be able to squeeze back in!)