anyone have an ark??

It seems that heavy rain and floods are pretty much the state of things across the country these days and now it is affecting us parkies as well. The park employees who live down by the river at Rio Grande Village were told to evacuate their homes today, that's about 8 families. The water is expected to reach a level of 33 feet (above it's normal level) by Friday at which point the employee housing down there would be under 6 feet of water. So the park rented about 10 U-Hauls today and lots of people pitched in to help load them up.

Until things get back to normal, I guess the displaced employees will be staying at the lodge and anywhere else they can find to put them up for a bit, i.e vacant houses and such. Even if the water doesn't get as high as they are predicting, I can only assume that it will still damage their homes somewhat. At the very least they will need new carpet. My heart goes out to them all, and I hope that no one loses anything important to them.

I was at a baby shower down at that part of the park on Saturday. At that point the campground was closed due to flooding. I drove by the river to check it out, and it was definitely up higher and moving very very fast.

Iffy and I got to thinking today about what we would take if we had only a day to pack up. The only thing I came up with was photo albums and the papers in the file cabinets. Everything else...who cares. I hate our couch anyways, so if it floated away that would be fine with me. All my glass can get wet, it would be ok. But if we had to pack up because of an impending flood we would all really be in trouble seeing as that we live about 5000 feet above the river.

We also were postulating that this must me a record high for the river. Or at least one would hope that it wasn't known that the river gets this high when the decision was made to build those houses where they did. Though I wouldn't totally put it past the brains behind the US government to do so. I can just imagine it now, after a series of long drawn out meetings with various contractors, someone says, "Oh it hasn't flooded that bad since 1825, it'll be fine!"

Sorry, I do not have any pictures of the river to post. It's probably one of those things that wouldn't mean as much if you didn't have to "normal" to compare it to. My grasp of normal is not even that good as I have only seen the river at that part of the park once before at "normal".

In other news, I took a yoga class this morning. It was in the Terlingua ghost town church (above). It was a very small class, just me and two others who were apparently regulars. I have never done yoga before, but am looking forward to continuing. The woman who teaches has classes on MWF at 8am, and she also comes to the park and does a class for the parkies on Thurs nights. I will probably go to those as well, but for Iffy's sake it is better to leave him with Sara in the morning rather than the evening when she turns into fuss-butt baby. But oh well, he'll just have to deal with it.

I am going to make a habit of going on Mondays as Iffy's days off are M and Tu. It will also be nice for me to have a weekly reason to get out of the house for a little while.

Here are your Sara pictures. I am going to go to bed now.

Goodnight

I love this picture. She looks like a little munchkin. Also notice the pastiness of my white white legs compared to her skin tone. (Thanks Doug, I stole this picture off your picturetrail!)

You can see her "toofers" on the bottom. She now has one on the bottom, and two on the top. But the ones on top are not the front incisors, they are the "next-to-the-front-incisors"teeth. One is totally out and one just poked through. She looks like a one sided vampire.