Receding Waters

Aside from losing our internet service for a few days, we continue to be personally unaffected by the floods here in Iowa. We have pretty much been glued to the TV since Wednesday watching the ongoing coverage. There hasn't been much else to do, since most of the main roads around and out of town are closed and still will be for several days.

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Ilya and his coworkers voluntarily evacuated their workplace on Gilbert Street Friday afternoon due to the rising water, but luckily it never came close to their building and they are back in business today. The Iowa River crested yesterday at 31.5 feet, which was lower than predicted. Now we are just waiting for it to go down so that the clean up can begin. It's been so sad to see so many of the area's beloved cultural and historic buildings waterlogged...the Czech Museum in Cedar Rapids, and Hancher Auditorium and Reck's Violin Shop in Iowa City to name just a few. Hopefully they were able to move most items of value to higher ground and will be back in business soon. Here in Iowa City, operations at UIHC are continuing as normal, although clinical duties for the medical students have been canceled for this week. I can't help but feel fortunate to be on vacation right now - from what I've heard, daily traffic to and from the hospital (which is usually extremely busy anyway) is very backed up as there is now only one open road leading to it.

The city of Coralville was advising residents to restrict water use the last several days, so we have been limiting our use to drinking water only. Yesterday we finally realized that the restriction was actually only for periods of heavy rain, since Coralville's issue is not the water supply itself (like in Cedar Rapids), but the sewers backing up after heavy rainfall. Needless to say after that we were quick to take our first showers since Wednesday. I also gratefully started using cloth diapers on Masha again after a 3 day hiatus. I have really grown to hate the disposables, and the images on the news of trash bags (possibly containing such disposables) floating in flood water around town made the idea of using them somehow counter-intuitive, but we did do it to avoid using the washing machine in the interim. I had forgotten how much the disposables leak - and wasn't too happy to rediscover this during the one time when I couldn't really deal with all the extra laundry they were creating. Ugh.

Not to get too controversial or political, but having recently watched both An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour, and now with the onslaught of flooding, tornadoes, earthquakes, and cyclones all over the world...this has been on my mind lately.

On an up note, Masha celebrated turning five months old yesterday with a new maneuver where she pulls herself upright onto all fours (previously she would only do this with her legs, but not her arms) and almost takes off crawling! She makes little forward motions with her elbows that look kind of like an army crawl. Super cute.