Livin' By Faith: Grab your hammer, I think we need to build an ark!!

We went for a walk around the town the day after all the flooding and every driveway pretty much had the same thing at the end of it....LOTS of soaked carpet, padding, rugs, furniture, etc. It was amazing at just how many houses basements were flooded!! House after house after house had piles of garbage sitting out! There were LOTS of sump pump hoses draining down driveways and onto the street, most with water gushing out of them! We couldn't do anything buy feel bad for the people.....(Oh yeah, and we saw dead CARP in the parking lot of the grocery store! They were huge!...like mini whales! It was from the river over-flowing and them swimming around the flooded area and then getting stuck when the water started to receed...interesting..)

We heard that Mason City (about 15 miles East of us) got about 10 inches of rain from that last big rain fall to give a total of 20 inches in the past couple weeks! Mason city's water was shut off due to flooding, which meant all the restaurants and stores were closed b/c of the unsanitary conditions without being able to wash your hands, etc...so no toilets could flush, no showers, no water was running..period. It was pretty bad! Plus to top it all off...we got ANOTHER 3 inches of rain last night!!

One kinda good thing that came from all this water was that when Nathan went to work on Monday, they told the crew that the whole operation is going to be shut down for the week b/c everything is flooded and there'd be NO way of getting into the fields (which are pretty much lakes as of now!) So Nathan has the whole week off!!! And to make things even better, he got PAID for the whole week too!! He has NEVER received paid time off, so it's been a treat to have him home and still be getting paid!!

Since we have this whole week with not too much to do, we decided to make a quick trip to St. Cloud on Tuesday, and we were at my parents house by 3pm. We wanted to get in a quick pontoon ride before the rain came! (My dad just bought a pontoon a couple weeks ago so we needed to test it out!) The boys LOVED it!!....even "I'm scared of the water" Caedmon was walking all over the place and throwing leaves into the water! We were very impressed! My mom's cousin Sylvia from Washington state came to visit so she was at my parents house too. It was fun to see her since it's been a good 8 years since we've seen her!

We didn't do too much else in St. Cloud (besides looking at the finished road out on the development and visiting the chiropractor) and we left by the morning on Wednesday. On our way home, we thought it would be fun to stop by our good friends house, Wade and Michelle, who live in Hanover (by St. Michael/Albertville) for a couple hours since it has been a YEAR since we've seen Michelle and the kids! Wade has stayed with us in Luverne while working in Sioux Falls, but it was nice to see him again too! Once we started gabbing and enjoying each other's company, we were convinced by Wade to stay the night! We had a wonderful waffle breakfast this morning and we left shortly after that! It was a great time!

Sylvia and Brayan (doesn't she look like my mom?!?)