One Month Later...

This past Monday was the one month mark of when the levee broke. I have now been in Iowa for a month. Hard to believe!! One month later most of the area is out of water, Oakville is cleaning up, we still can't get to our house, and my parents are slowly moving into another house.

On Tuesday, I took a drive through the bottoms and on up to Oakville. It was the first time I have been to Oakville since it flooded. It's so strange to see. The homes look like they've been abandoned for a long time with windows out and water marks on the siding. Every house has a huge pile of trash in front of it - wallboard, cabinets, insulation, and any other destroyed item. There's not a blade of grass to be seen. Every thing is dry, brown, barren, desolate, and dusty. But it was BUSY!! There were people working on almost every house, and lots of traffic. I saw church trailers from Mississippi, the Red Cross disaster recovery truck, and several dump trucks bringing rock in to repair highway 99.

I took every possible road to our house to just see how close we could get. The closest I could get was a mile from the house, which is good, but not good enough (in my opinion!!). I leave in about a week and am really, really hoping to get to the house before I do. I asked Dad last night and he wasn't sure, but hopeful. The river had gone up a bit, enough that the bottoms weren't draining into the Mississippi. The river has gone down now, so it's draining again. Hopefully it will drain enough to go. If not, Dad said he may try to find a way to get there. :)

STRANGE sighting - I was on top of the Big Ditch yesterday. As I was standing on the bridge, I looked on one side of it and saw fields still covered with water. I stood in the same spot and looked on the other side and saw lush, green cornfields - with an irrigator going! (for you non-farm people, that would be a large contraption that sprays water on the fields - think enormous sprinkler! :) It was weird to see too much water and not enough water within a quarter mile of each other. Couldn't we have balanced this out a bit?!

This week I've been working in the new house most of the week. We've been cleaning and I've been painting a couple rooms. Mom is off today and I'm about to go out there and the two of us are going to work there all day again.

I took several pictures of Oakville and the surrounding area. I don't have a lot of Oakville right now. I felt a little guilty driving around taking pictures without helping! You can find them on my Shutterfly site.

Some fun, non-flood related news...I'm about to start my fifth year of teaching in Plano, which I can hardly believe. Time goes so fast! The first three years I taught elementary special education, and last year I taught regular third grade. I enjoyed it, but realized special ed is more of my niche. I took a job at an early childhood school in the Plano school district as a PPCD teacher, which stands for "Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities." In other words, preschool special ed. I'll have a morning class and an afternoon class. I thought I was going to have all four-year-olds. I emailed with the speech therapist that I'll work with this week and found out my morning class will be THREE-year-olds and my afternoon will be fours, all with special needs. woo hoo!!! I'm really excited to have the three-year-olds and the fours will be a nice change in the day. I'll have about 10-12 in each class, and yes, I'll have a full-time aide with me all day! It's going to be so much fun!!!