An explanation of my absence

Hello, all!

It's been a while since I last made a posting here. I apologize. It's been a bit crazy here where I live this week. On this past Tuesday, (TECHNICALLY Wednesday morning, July 13, 2017 at 12:28 a.m.,) a very slow moving storm came though and dumped an "unofficial" 12.94 inches - 32.87 centimeters - of rain on the area we live in, in just under eight hours.

Now I was up when the storm started, texting with my husband, who was at work, and we knew pretty quickly that it was going to be bad for us - worse still for more people and devastating for others in town. Our town is split down the middle and then basically into thirds at one end because we live in a town where two rivers meet. There are several streams and creeks and lakes nearby as well, and many people live extremely close to water here.

By 1:00 a.m., our back yard was flooded and was flowing right over our drainage tiles and dumping over our retaining walls. (We live toward the bottom of a hill.) We had some flooding and some headaches and lost quite a bit of stuff and had a lot of clean up the next day - but many in our town lost their homes and everything they have. We endured a day of cleaning and minimal loss. We became homebound as the rivers rose to FOUR TIMES their normal depth. We were able to leave town at one point to get to a big box home improvement store to purchase a shop vac to clean with, and squeegees to help, before our one accessible road leading away from town flooded over. Our little area of the countryside and leading into town was one of a few sections where literally every road around us was under water. And then we lost power, along with the majority of our small community of 10,000.

Now obviously there have been worse things to happen in history and natural disasters and everything, but this is historic flooding in our town. And my children, ages 10 and 4, have never lived through anything remotely like this.

We are lucky because of where we are located, we still had access into town far enough to get to a Walgreens (but no pharmacy staff, just retail - which was fine and truly enough for us,) the gas station on this end of town, and the grocery store on this end of town. We were okay provided they stay open, which - thankfully - they did.

We stocked up on bottled water and some snacks and fruit, extra bread and peanut butter and jelly for easy meals to supplement dry and canned goods at home, bought some candles and extra batteries, ice for our cooler... we were pretty set. We had the ability to charge our phones and iPads in the car for entertainment for the kids and to keep ourselves accessible to info online and in contact with friends and family... we were pretty good. Very lucky.

Police monitored bridges and roads, a state of emergency was declared and the National Guard called on to help. State government came in to survey damage and to speak to update people on the goings on and everything and we just rode it out. All bridges were closed off and many were trapped. People were only allowed to be out past an emergency town wide curfew if they were evacuating or traveling for work - at their own risk. My husband had to get out for work - and had to drive through a section of flooded road and past check points, then around and back to work - a normal trip of five minutes stretched to nearly an hour.

After two days (Wednesday and Thursday day,) of no power, no air conditioning (with high humidity and temps of 80 F/27 C to 90 F/32C) and just a battery operated camp fan to cool one room for me and my children to try to keep cool in, we made the decision to leave and stay with my inlaws for the night since our power was supposed to have returned by that point - but hadn't yet. We were informed it could be the next day or possibly Sunday (today) when it would be turned on. We packed up and decided to drive through the lowest flooded road (along with several other people and the National Guard monitoring,) and get out to where we could have access to a bathroom other than peeing outside or into a bucket to dump, or going to the Walgreens for number two, and access to air conditioning and a place to shower and sleep with some normalcy. Once past the flood zone, we stopped at the same box chain home improvement store we'd gone to on Wednesday morning, this time to try to get a generator for the house for when we would get back in the morning. They had marked up the prices and a 2K watt generator was now doubled in price to $800 from the slightly steep normal cost of about $400. So we said NOPE and kept going to the inlaws.

Friday morning, we stayed at my inlaws house until my husband came from work to get us. He had a friend generously give us two small generators and a spare motor for one to help us out - and told him we could keep one of them and the spare motor after for $100. So now we own one and are borrowing the other for a little while. Got the generators home and set up so we could keep our food in the fridge and deep freezer from spoiling and turn on the tv and use our wifi again for the kids to watch some movies at home.

Later Friday afternoon, one road from us out of town opened up, so we decided to take the kids to our gym for family time swimming just to get them out of the house and away from the situation for a few hours to relax and not be worried anymore for a bit - because it was scary and stressful for us, but even more so for them because they'd never been exposed to or seen disaster, let alone experience it firsthand. We saw some friends there and it was good for everyone to just be away for a bit.

When we returned home, we had to gas up the generators and start them again, as they'd gone out just before we returned (they last about four hours,) and lol and behold - a half hour later, our power was restored. The waters were receding, the DNR ordered our dam to be slowly lowered, and bridges were opening. Things were returning to normal for most of the town, but still quite a lot of people were and are displaced and have lost everything. We were still under a curfew for Friday night - third straight night - due to outlying roads being under water and the still fast moving flood in downtown and along the waterways.

Saturday was a day for families to clean up and the community to band together to start helping those closest to the flooded areas as the water receded and their homes emerged. Several more remain underwater even now.

Everything was getting better. After the initial rain that caused all this to our town, it had been hot and sunny and warm, so things were looking positive. There had been an outpouring of support and kindness and donations and helpers from within our community and neighboring communities. People are being incredible and supportive - I've never seen anything like it. So wonderful to see a community band together. Then around 5:00 p.m. CDT, there was an alert for more thunderstorms tonight. More flood warnings. My husband and I and our kids went into town and picked up more sandbags to prepare - and sure enough, it started storming just after midnight today, (Sunday, July 16,) and rained until after 1:00 a.m.

I'm hoping it didn't dump enough rain to bring the rivers and streams and lakes up much more than they already are because our town does not need anymore.

We've had enough.