School is out, vacation mode is activated.

If anyone can tell me why I thought it was a good idea to let my child have some of his buddies come for a sleepover the day before hosting my nephew’s graduation party, please enlighten. The party is meant to be outside, taking advantage of our acres of patio, but it may rain this evening, meaning we can’t set up tables and decorate until tomorrow morning.

The next reasonable chore on the list? Mopping the kitchen floor. The definition of a useless task? Mopping the kitchen floor when there are three ten-year-old boys in the vicinity.

This morning as he was gathering up his backpack for school, the boy looked up at me in horror and said, “Uh-oh. I was supposed to learn this song for school today! It’s for our state project in social studies.” (Whew! This means it’s not for his pain in the ass music teacher.)

He hands me the lyric sheet for Rocky Top. “God. I hate this song. Tell them your mother wouldn’t allow you to memorize Rocky Top because that song turns people into idiots.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. You watch a UT game some Saturday. You can be sitting beside a brain surgeon, they start blasting Rocky Top, and suddenly he is a toothless idiot who feels the need to stand up and do some stupid looking dance and start yelling Yee-Haw.”

A few minutes later the husband comes in from the other end of the house. “So. all ready for school?”

“Yeah, except I was supposed to learn Rocky Top for Social Studies today, and I didn’t.” Without a pause, the husband, born, raised and educated in Philadelphia surrounded by classical music and conservative Jews throws his hands up and shouts. “Good ole Rocky Top! Rocky Top Tennuuuuhsseeeeeeee!” And breaks into a stupid looking dance.

The kid and I look at each other, and he says, “Wow, you’re right.”

Forget tobacco, marijuana, and meth, I think there should be a PSA campaign showing the danger of prolonged exposure to Rocky Top.

This morning I was going to meet Athena for coffee and I detoured briefly into our town’s only professional art supply store to get some new tubes of paint. As I was checking out the cute (and young…sigh) guy behind the counter looked at me and said, “Your hair is very drawable.” I thanked him, and he said, “You’re welcome. Most people wouldn’t realize that was a compliment.”

Here is a picture of my drawable hair. If you haven’t seen me in the last six months, or ever, I decided to live with the truth of myself and my prematurely gray gene pool, and let my hair revert to it’s natural shade of…well, white, with some lingering stubborn streaks of…reddish, blondish, who knew what was under all that L’oreal? Cute stuffed rodent added for eye size comparison.

Taken with Photobooth. I am not naturally that pink, unless it was a long ago family vacation where I was trapped on my uncle’s boat for eight hours without sunscreen.

Now…I promised a story of something the flood returned, so here it is.

I have a Shel Silverstein drawing. The long story is that I originally had two, which came to me a couple of years apart. When I got the second one, I left it with the friend who framed the first one. She was busy, I was busy, weeks passed. One day she called me and confessed that she had been tearing her shop apart for two weeks, and the Shel drawing was nowhere to be found. It had vanished into thin air. She was terribly sorry, but she just could not find it anywhere. Well, what can you do? She was mortified, but seriously? It was a drawing that practically drifted down out of the sky into my hands, pure luck that I had happened to have one, let alone two. I chalked it up to fate and got on with my life. Beloved Shel died in 1999, so it’s been more than a decade since the drawing went Poof!

Fast forward…on Monday I get an email from my friend with the subject line “You Are Not Going to Believe This!” Since she is not the type to forward fake photos or diet scams I opened the email. It said “I was moving things up off the floor during the flood, and I opened a box of old family photos. Guess what was staring up at me? Your long lost Shel Silverstein drawing. Funny thing is, as soon as I saw it, I remembered putting it away for safe keeping when you brought it in.” So here it is, more than ten years after it was given up for lost, coughed up by the very flood that took so much from so many. Welcome home Uncle Shelby!

Yesterday afternoon I was crouched down in a puddle shooting photos of the sun sparkling off the raindrops from an afternoon shower. Stop me if you’ve heard this one…or seen images very similar to these lately. If you were to search my archives (don’t worry, I’ll save you the time), you’d see that I take a lot of photos just after it’s rained. And lately, it’s rained a lot around here. Perhaps you heard of our recent go ’round of dampness. I am considering taking up lichen farming.

No, I have not lost the ability to focus.

I guess it’s time to move on with life. The flood and it’s aftermath are still a daily presence for lots of folks around town. You’d be hard pressed to drive down any residential street and not see a pile of sodden furniture in front of at least one house, waiting for the removal trucks. I saw this video the other night on the local news. Pep Boys Flood

It’s from the security cameras inside and auto parts store that is about two miles from my house. We drive past it twice a day taking the boy to school. Weekdays this is a very busy intersection, which makes it that much more remarkable that the worst of the flooding happened when lots of businesses were closed on Sunday morning.

I was telling one of my friends who lives out of town that I think we are the only people in town who not only escaped the flood, but benefited from it. Case in point, our favorite wine store. We had stopped by on Friday the 30th and bought a few bottles. We went back after the water receded to to see if they’d had much damage, or were open again. The water had been up to the ceiling, and the building was a total loss. The insurance claim had already been filed, and the owner was taking his good customers on a little disaster tour before the demolition crews started. He pointed us to what used to be the Spanish section and said, “Take all you can carry. If you don’t it’s going to be smashed.” Well, to us that’s the equivalent of “This pitiful dog is scheduled for euthanasia if we can’t find it a home”. So we stepped up and adopted all the orphaned wine we could carry. As the owner of the store said, “It’s not like you guys won’t be back once we’ve reopened.”

True. Very true.

The flood washed up another prodigal, but that story will have to wait a bit.

I understand Anderson Cooper was here yesterday. I forgot to watch. I haven’t left the house much this week, mainly because with lots of family in the fire department, I know how emergency workers feel about spectators, and how dangerous it can be. Plus I always think about how I’d feel if it was my stuff flooded or burnt up, and people were driving past taking pictures.

The husband doesn’t feel that way. He comes from a long line of Looky-Loos who like to get as close as possible to a scene of destruction or a medical emergency, and believe that firefighters and EMTs actually enjoy an audience.

Monday he wanted to go check out the creek that runs along the greenway about a mile from our house. The creek had risen 23 feet, swept away numerous cars, washed out a railroad bridge and drowned a couple on their way to church. He said, “I’ll bet I could get much closer if I rode my bike than if I drove.” It’s like he wants his eventual tombstone to read “Should Have Stayed Behind the Barricade!”

The other reason for not leaving the house is water conservation. We are under mandatory conservation orders, and I try and not inflict myself on others in an unshowered state unless they are more unshowered than me. I am going out to my friend Lauri’s place this weekend. Oh, sure, I claim it is to help her with some work, and because we haven’t gotten to hang out much lately. But truthfully, it’s because she has a well, and therefore no water restrictions. There is a long hot shower in my foreseeable future, and probably some bacon. It’ll just be our little secret, ok?

This is kind of what my hair looks like right now.

Thanks to our lofty perch at the top of a hill, and the obsessively redundant French drain system the husband insisted on having installed before we moved in, we have escaped the flooding unscathed.

Our street looked like a kayak run for a while, but all the houses sit well above street level in this neighborhood.

I’ve been rather sleep deprived during their visit since the gentleman friend with the overactive bladder takes out his hearing aids at night and doesn’t realize that he’s left the water running every time he goes to the bathroom. And believe me, he goes to the bathroom a lot, which means I have to get up after him and turn off the faucet.  When they aren’t slamming doors, dropping things and loudly informing one another that they have to go to the bathroom, their combined varieties of snoring sound like something off the Three Stooges.

If I ever had any desire to grow old, it has gone. Now, I am off to have a drink in the sun and cook something for dinner that has extra sodium, lots of cheese and at least half a bottle of Tabasco.

My mother-in-law is visiting with her boyfriend.

There should seriously be another word besides boyfriend for a man of 85 with dual hearing aids and an overactive bladder.

My husband is working for all but one day of their visit.

It is raining buckets.

My house is mostly windows.

He is incapable of passing a window without stopping to look out and comment on the fact that it is raining.

You really haven’t lived until you’ve heard Rain Rain Go Away sung with the full operatic soprano treatment.

They are working the pithy rain comments into their busy schedule of taking pills, taking turns in the bathroom and “just having a little something to eat.”

When one of them goes to the bathroom, the other one sits and stares at the bathroom door until they have emerged safely. For any other dangerous activity, such as swallowing a pill, spreading non-dairy trans-fat free margarine on half a slice of toast, reaching for a glass from the cabinet or reading a book, the other one hovers no more than ten inches away in case their help should be needed.

That repeated thudding sound you hear is my forehead smacking against any hard surface I can find.