The depressing part of this weeklong series of rainstorms is (for me, not necessarily the people who have been flooded out) the all-day darkness. That really gets to me. That, and the fact that if there is no letup, my toilet will refuse to flush. That's kind of hard to deal with, too. Really hard if it lasts for a day or more, but this time around there have been enough breaks in the weather that it has regulated itself. It only takes a couple of hours of no rain to resolve that problem, until the next time.

More rain is due over the next week, so I expect more dreariness to settle over me and weigh me down. So far, the power hasn't gone out, so I can be grateful for that. During the most severe cloudbursts, my dish will be unable to find its satellite and I'll lose my TV signal. And when the phone line gets wet, I get a crackling static that sometimes hangs up on callers without my even wanting it to. See how things just pile on?

It doesn't help that my insomnia is at its worst right now. My doctor is totally unsympathetic, because he thinks I'm not trying hard enough. He wants me to follow some kind of routine that involves total sensory deprivation, but I think I'm deprived enough already. Those people on TV are my only friends at two o'clock in the morning, and I'm not about to turn my back on them. For the benefit of my doctor, I do take melatonin every night and occasionally brew a cup of valerian tea. So he can't say I'm ignoring him completely.

Anyway, I keep going. I know this will all pass and everything will be fine again. And I'm getting so used to not sleeping that I'm missing less and less that feeling of being rested. If this is how it's going to be, I'll just accept it and work around it. On balance, everything is so good that I almost feel guilty complaining about the weather and such. Almost.
----------

Five feet high and rising.
----------
During the worst days, when the rain is at its most relentless, the water in my back yard gets higher and higher and approaches my back porch. I feel as if I'm living on an island. The driveway floods, and the water in the driveway floods the garage, because of the way it slopes downward. There are puddles I can't go through or around without boots, so I wear my boots. But I've never had water come into the house except through that pesky leak in the roof, and I got a new roof this year so I won't have to contend with that any more.