Water, Water Everywhere

My friend Deneal asked me: Are you guys under water out there? I keep hearing about tons of flooding in Iowa right now.

Here was my response:
Right now our river is at 22.8 feet and falling (flood level is 20 feet). So our golf course is a swimming pool again, but for the most part we are doing fine. People's sump pumps are working hard, and some people (including my friend Staci) have a bit of water in their basements. But Des Moines (40 mins south of us) is having major flooding, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City in the east are having terrible problems, and somewhere near Council Bluffs in the west is where the tornado killed 4 Boy Scouts (and, of course, Parkersville northeast of us with the terrible tornado a few weeks ago). So we are surrounded by craziness, but luckily we don't have too many problems. It is a bit scary being here with all of this stuff going on around us. We will be having more rain tomorrow night and into Sunday, so we'll see how the flood levels are after that point. There is a woman in my ward, Tina, who has some pictures on her blog that show better than mine did what some of the flooding has looked like. Her blog doesn't enable me to link directly to the post, so if you want to see pictures of what Ames has looked like, go to http://www.clarkavenue.blogspot.com/ and scroll down a couple of posts until you see "flooding."