This week was mostly a normal week until Wednesday. For me, Friday and Saturday were mostly dominated by David Copperfield. I did finish reading it on Saturday night, finally! It has a good ending (thankfully, after 900 pages, the ending better be good!).
Frank had to work all day on Sunday. It wasn't supposed to be all day, but there were lots of problems so he ended up working from 10:00 am to 10:00 pm. He's had a really busy week at work the rest of the week too, and worked overnight last night. He really needs a vacation! Thankfully, he will be off work this weekend as well as Monday and Tuesday next week.
Seth has continued to do well with the new routine and so have I. He started carpooling with another family to Seminary so I just have to get him from Seminary to school each morning. I'm not really sure where the days are going, though...they seem to fly by. I feel like I should be getting more things done. I had book chat on Tuesday evening, which was fun as always. Maybe not quite as fun as usual because Jane's (one of the members of the group) father passed away earlier that day, so we felt bad about that.
Wednesday we got the remnants of Hurricane Ida so it rained all day long. It wasn't super heavy rain in the morning but it got heavier in the early afternoon. By the time Seth's school dismissed at 2:15, it was absolutely pouring. I went to pick him up since he didn't even have an umbrella. There was so much traffic around the school that I had to park quite a ways away but I had two umbrellas so I walked over to the school with both of them and met Seth there and we each had our own umbrella to use walking back to the car. Even so, we both got quite wet! It was windy as well as raining so the rain was blowing onto us and the roads and sidewalks were already flooding so we were wading through puddles most of the way to the car. A cute girl popped under Seth's umbrella with him at the school and walked part way with us until she found out where her parent was to pick her up. After she left, I asked Seth who that was and he said "Oh, that's my friend Jensen." He told us the first week of school he had made friends with someone named Jensen in one of his classes, but I just assumed that "Jensen" was a boy! 😅 He's not really showing much interest in girls, though, except as friends. Which is fine with me!
Frank made it home not too long after we did. We kept getting flash flood warning alerts on our phones and some of the flooding was quite nearby. A lot of parents had all kinds of problems getting their kids home from school because the buses started encountering flooded roads and had to return to the schools with the kids still on the buses. (Middle schools and elementary schools dismiss later than the high schools so the roads were worse by the time those schools dismissed.) So the parents had to go pick up the kids instead! Apparently, the county sheriff's department asked the schools to pull all the buses off the roads because they were doing a lot of water rescues. There was even one school bus in the county that got stuck in flood waters and the bus driver and the 10 kids on board had to be rescued by boat. A mom in our ward left her house to pick up her kids from school--2 miles away--and while she was gone the roads flooded so much that she couldn't get back home for 5 hours! It was crazy.
Meanwhile, Frank and I were making dinner and discovered that we didn't have meat out of the freezer. We thought we had taken it out the day before...both of us remember doing that...but it was not in the refrigerator! By then the rain had mostly stopped so we decided to venture out and see if we could find something to eat. We made it to Cracker Barrel without any problems and were even able to get food that fit into our diet pretty well. (That's why we chose Cracker Barrel in the first place.)
That evening, we got a message from the school system that school would be delayed 2 hours this morning because of the flooded roads. That meant no Seminary either so we all got to sleep in a bit on Thursday. I still woke up right at 5:00, but I went back to sleep for about 45 minutes. We got another message from the school system saying that the 2 hour delay would be re-evaluated at 7:00 am. At that point, they decided to cancel school for the day. Later, we got an email explaining that the sheriff's department had asked the school district to keep all the buses off the roads so they would have time to assess damage to the roads and make sure all the roads are structurally safe. I actually wasn't that surprised that school was cancelled because we also had river flood warnings and one of the places that was expected to flood was a main road between Frederick and Walkersville. River flooding always concerns us a bit since the river is right behind our house, so I was keeping an eye on the river yesterday. It was definitely flooded at first light and continued to rise. By around 10:30, Seth and I went out to take some pictures. The river was quite flooded...probably as much as I've seen it besides after Hurricane Sandy. I'm not sure it got quite as high as it did then, but it was close. However, it didn't rise very much after we were out looking and by early eveing it was going back down so there was no danger of our house flooding, thankfully.
I took this last photo from th hill behind our house.
Not everyone in our ward was as lucky as we were, though. A few families got water in their basements and one of them was my friend Rebekah and her family. Their sump pump wasn't working properly, apparently, and by the time they noticed, they had about 4 inches of water in the storage area of their basement and it was flooding into the family room / office area which has carpet. Last night I went to their house, along with several other members of our ward, to help them move everything out of their basement up to their main floor or upper floor so they could start drying out the carpet. I was careful and didn't lift anything heavy...I mostly packed food storage items into boxes for other people to carry upstairs. I actually got there a bit late so a lot of the work was already done by the time I got there. We were able to finish up within an hour of my arrival. They have someone coming to look at it tomorrow and thankfully it sounds like their homeowner's insurance will cover the damage so hopefully they will end up with a nicer basement than they had before...new carpet. But right now it's really stressful, of course, and their house is in chaos with all the things they had to move.
I had a YW presidency meeting yesterday afternoon and Frank and Seth both got haircuts too so it was a fairly busy day.
Frank had to work all night last night...he got home shortly before I got up at 5:00 am. Yes, we are back on a regular school schedule today. It is quite a bit cooler and dryer today...as a matter of fact, it was chilly enough this morning that I used the heater in the car when I went to pick Seth up from Seminary. On the way to the church, I saw about 10 deer grazing in a field right next to the main road (Schifferstadt Boulevard). As I drove past, one of them lifted up its head and looked around alertly...I wish I could have got a picture of that! It was pretty cool.
Now I need to run to the store to get a few items and I have a lot of other things to do, so that is it for this week.
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