I asked my mom if they'd gotten the olive leaf back from the dove yet. I think I found it more funny than she did.

My mom and stepdad and the rest of Those Who Share DNA And/Or Memories With Me are living like Noah right now -- or maybe just stuck in that "up a creek without a paddle" saga. They're all underwater. Not like, "Katrina" underwater. Just this kind of underwater. But seeing where all the flooding reached in cell phone snapshots of my uncle "rescuing" my cousin in his canoe, and by listening to my mom talk about her hour drive to work (it's usually 15-ish minutes), it felt really unreal.

And for once, I'm glad I'm not there in Ohio with them.

To add injury back to this insult, in July when I was there, the lack of rain was so apparent that the grass crunched under bare feet in the yards, and running across the lawn kicked up little cartoon-like clouds of dust. My stepdad bought a rain gauge with some sort of beeper on it, so it'd go off as it filled up. "If it ever rains again," chuckle, chuckle, we said.

I'm guessing they disabled that function sometime before they started singing "I'm an Island."

I hate floods. Fires. Tornadoes. Really, anything out of my control. But what can you do? Grab a paddle I guess.

My stepdad told me one Christmas as I held my new firebox that no, Erin, they don't make houses out of that stuff. Hm. Well. They should. And then they should encase it in home-sized life preservers.