Damn Flood

damn flooding. you know, i damn a lot of things. i complain a lot on this blog. oh well. anyway, back to my rant on flooding. something always seems to happen when i go to dauphin island lately. if it's not a major chemical spill, it's mega-flooding. last friday...and yesterday. friday the flooding prevented me from going to the island and left me stuck with huge quantities of baked goods. but this time, i had to go. i had my phys oce class. and what a disappointment that was. for once, we were going over chapters that didn't come with homework. i was getting happy, we were about to leave...then, bam. we get stuck with a looong problem that we had skipped way back in chapter 2. but we get two weeks to do this one. and it came in exchange for another test. so, maybe one long homework problem isn't so bad, since it means that we won't have the open-book take-home exam in a couple of weeks (as opposed to the closed-book take-home exam, which we will have). also, i was pleasantly surprised to see that i actually made a decent grade on last week's homework...it was a B. much better than the last couple of homework grades (the last one was embarrassingly bad - i won't tell you what it was). i'd really better start putting some effort into my phys oce homework. i don't want it to cause me to get a B in the class. and anything less than a B would make me cry. literally. in grad school, a C is failing. absolutely unacceptable. so i strive for A's, as always.

anyway, i have digressed big time. remember how i sent the really pathetic email begging dr. v. not to have his seminar class next friday and he said he wouldn't? well, it no longer matters. we will be subjected to a 6-hr phys oce class anyway. one of the girls in the class made plans to go out in the field that day. damn. so, we're left with making up our missed class on wednesday morning...before our regular class that afternoon. yuck. a 9-4 class with an hour for lunch in the middle. i think my brain might really explode after that. wish me luck next wed., folks.

ok, i'm really getting back on track this time. i started off talking about the flooding going on around here. well, it started to storm around the time i reached DISL yesterday...thunder, lightning, the whole shebang. it was so bad, the projector screen kept vibrating. anyway, the rain had lightened up some (but not the lightning) by the time i was leaving the island around 4:30. it didn't matter. the island still hadn't drained from last week's storms (claire's yard looks like a pond), so with the added rain, the whole island was pretty much under water. i probably shouldn't have driven through some of the water that i did. but my tiny kia didn't stall, thank heaven, and i made it back to mobile safe and sound. i did notice, however, that there are lots of new potholes appearing with all the rain. i ran in a series just after the bridge by the fowl river marina and another set on knollwood just past the hospital. they weren't there last week. anyway, it's been beautiful today, but there are still lots of roads closed and washed out completely in some cases. christian lives in pascagoula (or somewhere near there...in mississippi, anyway), and he said that a tornado hit his neighborhood right after he left for DISL yesterday. he wasn't sure he could get home. i don't know if he did...he was still at DISL when i left. i hope things turned out ok for him. you know, i don't know anyone who also knows christian who would know what i'm talking about, but he looks like a smaller version of nikolai khabibulin (goaltender for the tampa bay lightning, for those of you who don't know). i've never told him that, but i think it every time i see him (twice a week for three hours at a time). that was my first thought when i met him. he doesn't twitch, though. but he does smoke.

alas, i have digressed once more. anyway, the moral of this post: heavy rain and flooding suck. damn flooding.