Cincinnati has just finished the rainiest April on record. It barely missed the record for the rainiest month ever, coming in second to January of 1937 when 13.68 inches of precipitation led to the kind of flooding where rowboats were the only way to get around downtown.
What happens when you have an April like this one? Well, what looks like a mix of coffee with heavy cream is overflowing the Ohio River, the Great Miami and the creek on our golf course. You could easily mistake the soccer and farm fields along our usual bike route for lakes except that they have stands of trees in the middle of them. When I went
to my piano lesson last week, one of my teacher’s neighbors had a pile of rolled up, wet carpeting at the curb. There were three trucks in her driveway, including one cleaning service van which had a house, whose windows were gushing water, painted on the side. One of my friends says her house in Mt. Adams is secure; but the hillside, cars and trees across the street are in the process of sliding into her deck and hot tub.
My golf league is headed for a record three weeks straight of cancellations, and it’s too wet to even practice on the driving range. We played Swamp Golf on Friday afternoon in Oxford with our friends Doug and Joanie, slogging through long grass and mucky, wet goop with alligators and piranhas nipping at our heels. I lost count of the number of times I used a “hand wedge” to get my ball from deep, impossible rough onto the fairway.
I bought rosemary and basil plants at Kroger’s but, while I was waiting until Mother’s Day to put the basil plants in the ground, they O’Ded on water and some of the stems rotted. Now the plants are drying out in our jacuzzi. Even the Cirque de Soleil had to cancel performances - since Old Coney Island is under water, its tents are underwater too, although I thought there was a version of Cirque de Soleil that was done in big tanks of water so I’m disappointed at their lack of creativity.
I know food is not supposed to be your emotional support system, and, for an entire month, I have held back the urge to bake and gobble up a large batch of chocolate chip cookies. The other day, however, I did find comfort in a second slice of buttered raisin pumpernickel toast and you can probably guess who did some “mining” for Oreos in the carton of Cookies N’ Cream last week. Last night, when our neighbors, Tim and Kathy, came over for dinner, she was wearing her old “comfort sweater” and the four of us wrapped ourselves in a cozy cocoon of pasta with red sauce and bacon, chocolate cream pie and two bottles of red wine.
A week ago, my cabin fever got so bad that I organized and filed all of our recent financial statements – a sure sign of desperate boredom. (I briefly revisited the chocolate chip cookie option but reminded myself that I DO have to fit into my biking shorts for our trip in June.) Anyway, I discovered that two letters - one with the last four digits of the account number and another with my PIN number - were the only records I had of a money market account I had opened in December. I had visions of my money making laps in cyber space for the next thousand years so I called Capital One – after all, I had plenty of time to do the Press One, Press two routine and sit through obnoxious background music if necessary.
I reached a real person pretty quickly; and she was so nice that, after I described my problem, I told her I was sorry she had had the bad luck to get me. “Oh, this is easy compared to the last three calls I’ve had,” she said before finding my account, promising not to tell Paul (this kind of thing just fritzes him out) and signing off with a cheery “Stay sane!” I’m not sure I’m doing a great job in THAT department.
I must also confess that, with too much unsupervised computer time, I found online access to Bookworm, a game I’ve played on airplanes before. You have to make words out of a whole grid of tiles and you get extra points for using green bonus tiles. When a red, burning tile appears, you have to use it before it migrates
to the bottom of the screen and torches your whole game. It is educational but highly addictive – you can try it for yourself if with this link
http://www.games.com/game-play/bookworm/single/ (Click on Play as a Guest if you don't want to sign in.) Don’t blame me, however, if your dirty laundry gets out of control, your family goes hungry and you wind up with a repetitive motion injury to your wrist. By the way, Bookworm does accept what David and John used to call “bathroom words.”
Of course, the weather situation could always be worse. Our roof or our basement could be leaking. Our house could be under water. We could be on some noisy, smelly Noah’s Ark with all those green alligators and long necked geese, those humpty-backed camels and those chimpanzees and everything else but unicorns. Hey, all this rain could even be snow. (See my post, "Snow Day.") At least, Paul’s perennial garden is as lush and bursting with flowers and buds as it has ever been – even the slacker Clematis, which for years has been my prime nominee as “The Plant Most Likely To Be Ripped Out and Fed to the Compost Heap,”
shows signs of flowering. In addition, Cabana’s, our favorite summertime riverside restaurant where they serve burgers as big as your head, is not underwater. Their trademark neon palm trees have survived the flooding and are waiting for us, and the sun, to return.
to my piano lesson last week, one of my teacher’s neighbors had a pile of rolled up, wet carpeting at the curb. There were three trucks in her driveway, including one cleaning service van which had a house, whose windows were gushing water, painted on the side. One of my friends says her house in Mt. Adams is secure; but the hillside, cars and trees across the street are in the process of sliding into her deck and hot tub. 
to the bottom of the screen and torches your whole game. It is educational but highly addictive – you can try it for yourself if with this link http://www.games.com/game-play/bookworm/single/ (Click on Play as a Guest if you don't want to sign in.) Don’t blame me, however, if your dirty laundry gets out of control, your family goes hungry and you wind up with a repetitive motion injury to your wrist. By the way, Bookworm does accept what David and John used to call “bathroom words.”
shows signs of flowering. In addition, Cabana’s, our favorite summertime riverside restaurant where they serve burgers as big as your head, is not underwater. Their trademark neon palm trees have survived the flooding and are waiting for us, and the sun, to return.
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