I don’t suppose it’s any wonder that I’ve been dreaming about floods lately, and not just any floods, apocalyptic, wipe out humanity, floating houses floods.

It’s been raining non-stop since sometime yesterday morning, and we’re to expect at least 5 inches in total. A week ago, it rained for three days straight, with somewhere between 6 and 9 inches of rain being reported in the area. We’re already looking at the damage in our garage as part of the ceiling has fallen in, making it nearly impossible to open the door.

Unfortunately, our landlord does not take responsibility for damages to our stuff, even if he has been warned well in advance that something needs repairing. Like when our fridge died with $250 worth of groceries in it… and he replaced it with a used one which died less than two weeks later, taking another $200 worth with it. Or how about the winter our basement flooded to two feet deep, and stayed that way until mid-July, ruining most of the stuff we had in storage and costing us $140 in clean-up and repair bills. The stuff we managed to salvage went into the garage, because at least it won’t flood. Of course, we’d told him the roof and ceiling needed work, and he sent his decrepit, Alzheimer-suffering, handyman to fix it. He put a piece of metal…thingy…up to hold the ceiling in place and walked away. This is the same guy that set fire to the wall behind the pipes under the sink while he tried to melt the plastic pipe to the metal one with a blowtorch, the same guy who nailed our doors shut from the outside, and who put a storm door on without anything to latch it to. Guess who was held responsible for the glass that broke when it slammed against the siding during a wind storm? Yeah. Me.

I don’t even know what all stuff is out in the garage right now. I have a general idea, and I know some of it isn’t ours. Argh, frustrating.

Anyway, back to the apocalyptic flooding. Two nights in a row, multiple tie-ins and everything. Enough heavy emotion in them to pull me out of sleep and keep me awake for hours, pondering the signs and all. Not that I’m saying there is a massive flood on the way, not at all; this isn’t the first year I’ve seen rain like this.

What I am pondering is why characters that I stopped writing about a while back have reappeared, and have been staring at me, in these dreams. Intense staring. Like, guilt-inducing, skin-crawling, heart-aching stares. These aren’t real people, they’re the constructs of bits and pieces of everyone around me. I suppose they’re giving me a hard time because I’ve stopped telling their stories. Or perhaps they and Danserak (my fornit) are giving me these dreams to say hey, get out the notebook and get to work.

*sigh* I’ve got less than five days to finish up the projects I’m currently working on (hmm, drowning in watery deadlines?) before I can even begin to think about wrapping up the Pagan Family series, let alone start anything new. Right?

Right?

Dam it. Pun ever so intended.

<3 JL