Washing away

Well, with a warm(er) rainy deluge following hard on the the heels of our big snowstorm, Western Washington is pretty much in a liquid state today. Roads are closed all over the place, including a 20-mile stretch of I-5; sinkholes are, well, sinking; Amtrak is out of service between Eugene and Vancouver; and people are being evacuated from more than the usual floodplains.

KING5: Gregoire declares statewide emergency
CNN: Pacific storm brings mudslides, blackouts to Northwest

Even for those of us on higher ground, the water is causing problems. Frank has spent the entire day trying to stay ahead of the flood in our basement, spending several hours running the ShopVac and then dumping out its 40-pound load. He's alternated this with cycling the laundry (now drenched) that I had let pile up in the laundry room. The girls have been helping out with folding, and they moved all the books their lazy mother was "storing" in the flood zone. MJ (whose driver's ed class is canceled tonight because the Rosehill Community Center has been damaged) has been using the hair dryer to try to salvage the books that got wet.

Fortunately—unlike my poor coworker who has suffered several thousand dollars' damage to his basement belongings—Frank has us all set up to cope with these crises. Most of our living space down there sits on an elevated subfloor. And he installed a laundry sink a couple of years ago that has significantly shortened his dumping-the-ShopVac route, not to mention sending all that water to the sewer instead of out into our yard where it might seep right back in again.

And where have I been during the crisis? Tucked up safe and dry and clean in my office, working on the SDK, which suddenly doesn't seem like such a nasty job.

Time for a little gratitude for all of us.
An 'attitude of gratitude' chases away stress

P.S. The photos above are "borrowed" off the Internet and do not depict our neighborhood.