up in iowa city the mighty iowa has shot its banks, flooding normandy drive, the park, the city, closing the university for over a week, etc. i don't watch television so i don't have the details, but, any time you have to wait for a hot air system to break up over the east coast, you're in big trouble, and, for iowans, this is at least the third hundred-year flood in less than thirty years. the one that wiped me out would have been in about '85, when i was living in a van down by the river, but i consider myself partly to blame for that, what was i thinking? this one seems more serious; normandy drive was an established neighborhood, not a place you'd want to evacuate.

down here, a heat we call "oppressive" gave way to showers that lifted steam off of the roads and lawns in the late afternoon. it sizzled. i was driving old and sick pets around and finally took the kids to mcd's to run around a while while it poured a little outdoors. my oldest son ran across the parking lot in the pouring rain to join his friends at the indiana jones movie; as for me, i enjoyed the steady stream of what one gets on an extended father's day weekend. one running joke is whether p-f can stand for pink flamingo or pink framingo, or even pickled french-fry- as opposed to, say, picture frame. or, whether a 3-year-old can be trusted to carry a decorated glass cup, as he runs past a bucket of toys that are, say, irresistable. or whether a father's day, postponed to late july for a boy who is in camp the month of june, is really the same. it's not actually a holiday that everyone has uniformly warm fuzzies about, though i, fortunately, have at least been consistently there for mine, they all know who i am, as i yell quite a bit just to make sure they don't forget.

the pets went down to anna, a small town not too far away, which was just as hot and oppressive as here, more so even. it's just the way it is...allergies explode, air-con blasts, one stays by a cool fan, late at night, and blogs....for peace.