For weeks now, my sister has been emailing me news links and photos of the Missouri River escaping its banks upstream of my hometown in Iowa. Everyone back home just keeps saying it: The flood is coming. The flood is coming.

The road to home is starting to close. Parts of I-29 between Kansas City and Omaha will be shut down if necessary. The levees in Hamburg, Iowa were breached yesterday. Amtrack stopped the trains through Iowa yesterday.

It's not rain. It's earlier rain, and release rates from upstream dams. I asked Pa what it all meant, what caused it, and he started talking about the Army Corps of Engineers and planned releases from dams and cubic feet per second of water twice to three times the normal amount due to early rain and significantly higher snowmelt in Montana. None of it made much sense to me.

Here's how the Corps of Engineers explained cubic feet:

A cubic foot of water can be compared to the size of a basketball, Jacobson said. On Wednesday, the Missouri River was 21.8 feet at Boonville, half a foot above flood stage, and was flowing at 166,000 cubic feet per second. Imagine watching 166,000 basketballs fly by every second, as Jacobson explains it. The Corps' forecast doubles that by the middle of the month.

Farmers are going to lose entire crops. Insurance won't cover the entire loss, not by a long shot. Hamburg pretty much needs to move its entire town. Businesses shut down, houses under water.

Sometimes I wonder if it's better to get hit out of the clear blue sky, like with a tornado, or whether it's better to have weeks and months to plan, like this flood.

I'm glad my family was able to move some stored crops out of the way so perhaps those won't be lost. I'm glad people are able to evacuate. But there's also the psychological impact of knowing the water is coming and there's really nothing you can do about it. The cubic feet per second are just too great.

Here in Kansas City, Parkville is the community most affected by the river. They're planning to hold back the river with tarp and sandbags. We've always groused Kansas City doesn't make enough of its riverfront, but maybe in this case that's a good thing.

Warning, no warning: Loss is loss. Maybe knowing in advance doesn't mean a thing if you're going to lose it all, anyway.

I asked Pa if there was going to be a blame game, and he said there always is with these sorts of things, but I think this one may be just too many cubic feet of water per second. Too much rain. Too much snowmelt.

The weather is changing, and the days in which we benefited from living by the river may have floated away with yesterday's barges and canoes.

The other night, the little angel wanted ice cream. We hauled out some sort of chocolate brownie something from Blue Bunny.

"No," she said. "The brownies taste bad in that ice cream."

"Well, then we should call them and tell them that."

Her mouth dropped open.

"Seriously, that's what you do when you're not satisfied with a product."

So we looked up the 800 number on the package and called them.

Beloved introduced himself.

"We have a problem. My daughter and I like to buy your ice cream, in many flavors, but she is REJECTING the brownie chocolate ice cream."

He took a deep breath.

"She says the brownies taste bad."

"That's the problem. We have a large carton of this ice cream, but the brownies don't taste good."

And then he hung up and we had a good laugh.

Imagine my surprise when at nine the next morning, the phone rang. Area code: 712. Wells HQ, on the phone.

The woman was very pleasant. She asked for the lot number and some other information from the bottom of the carton. "It's possible there was something wrong with the brownies," she said finally, taking the entire situation very seriously. "Would you like a coupon so your daughter can try a different flavor?"

Of course we would like a coupon.

When the little angel got home yesterday after a very exciting day at summer camp, I told her about the call and the coupon.

"See?" I said. "That's how it works."

Usually.

Well played, Le Mars, Iowa. 

I've been to urgent care twice and the ER once in the past week with my family. Nobody died (though Beloved's going to have a scar), but after a long stretch of no doctors, we were due.

Yesterday morning the little angel woke up clawing at her neck, which was fiery red and covered with bumps. I immediately thought she'd gotten into poison ivy down at the lake. Hydrocortizone didn't work, so I reached for the only thing that saved me from insanity when I had chiggar bites last time -- baking soda.

As we drove to the pediatrician's office for early morning walk-in hours, she complained only slightly as large clumps of baking soda fell off her neck onto her clothes.

The examination room was decorated like an ocean, just like my girl's room. There were metal crabs hanging from the walls, just like hers. I wondered where they shopped. I liked the seahorse.

The pediatrician told us it wasn't poison ivy, just some sort of bug bite -- or rather, about 35 of some sort of bug bite. Just on her neck. Totally weird. What kind of bug? Did it really matter? No.

So she prescribed some steroid cream to put on it and recommended Benadryl or Zyrtec -- which I totally could've given my girl when I first noticed the bumps on Sunday. Could've spared her a day of frantic itching.

Now, I realize this doesn't make me a bad mother. I'm not beating myself up over forgetting Benadryl. But sometimes I wonder where my common sense went. Did it get stuffed down under Internet Volume or Job Stress or Why Haven't I Heard From Those Agents Yet Worries? Is it hiding under my swimming suit? Did I sell it at the garage sale last weekend?

Why didn't I think of this completely obvious solution myself? Damn.

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Speaking of novels, I was totally jealous of Jane Austen when I read my last BlogHer Book Club selection, A Jane Austen Education. Review (and jealousy explanation) here.

I've often told my daughter that I try so hard not to rush, because I've noticed that rushing is one of the only things 100% guaranteed to make me yell. Anything else is a crapshoot, but rushing = yelling for me, unfortunately. I HATE TO RUSH. And I have a seven-year-old who moves at the speed of an ant.

This hatred of rushing is a real problem, since I work with the Internets and you can literally hack at the list all day and never ever ever get done. So why do I try to do just one more thing when I know I need to leave right away? It just grows back. Just like the grass in my lawn. That grows back every three days and takes an hour and a half to mow.

Wow, sorry. Got distracted there.

Imagine my amusement when my girl handed me a story she wrote recently about a mouse family.

Well, at least the mouse family never rushed.

The pool opened last weekend. I thought I was ready to go with my new halter swimdress (shut up) and my sunscreen and my baseball hat. Sure, it had been a long, cold winter accompanied by many, many seasoned wedge fries, but last summer I even bared midriff a few times and felt fine about it.

Also, I haven't had a full-length mirror in my bedroom since last summer. And I never go use my daughter's. So I actually don't know what I look like unless I catch my reflection in a store window, which only happens when I am fully clothed.

Imagine my surprise when I went to use the bathroom at the pool and caught sight of my full-frontal while pulling up my swimming suit. The florescent lights bouncing off cinder block highlighted every lump and bump that was not there last year.

My stomach seized up, and I started to feel hot and tingly.

I manage the anxiety that once caused my eating disorder through a combination of medication, previous talk therapy, exercise, sleep and maintaining a certain weight window in which I feel comfortable with myself. I seem to have tipped over the edge of that window this winter, because as I stumbled back toward my seat, I felt shaky.

And that was when I saw her, my new mom friend -- adorable and tiny and right in the path. I stopped to talk to her and knew I was coming off normal, but the entire time I was talking to her I just wanted to wrap my body in a beach blanket and starve until I felt better. I felt like she could see all the flaws and was taking stock, even though she's a delightful person and why would she do that? Of course she wasn't doing that. But I felt it: the shame.

And I haven't felt like that in years. YEARS.

I walked back to my chair and sunk in. The tears started rolling out from under my sunglasses a few minutes later. Beloved said nice things, tried to make me feel better -- but I know he didn't realize how seriously I was melting down at that moment.

I sat there telling myself I'm 37. I don't need to look like a 24-year-old. I'm a perfectly acceptable 37-year-old. And isn't that sort of shallow, anyway? And haven't I been writing a novel about a protagonist overcoming ED and haven't I been crusading about ED and taking issue with NYT ballet critics ALL YEAR? WHAT THE FUCK, BRAIN?

I took deep breaths. I told myself fat isn't a feeling. And I realized it isn't. My feeling was anxiety -- a severe hit of it -- and I was focusing it on my thighs. I was telling myself that I was a lost cause because I didn't stop working out this winter -- in fact I worked out harder than I have in years -- so it was difficult to stop catastrophizing that exercise no longer worked for weight maintenance, and I would just end up growing and growing from here with no hope. (Because that is the fear that my ED brain wants me to believe.)

My rational brain -- the one in charge 99% of the time -- knows that there is no "always" ever in anything in life, and weight management is just another one of those things. You don't always look great, you don't always look bad. Nothing is absolute, and everything about humans is in a constant state of flux, from our glucose levels to our shoe sizes to our hair length to our weight.

But revisiting that feeling, that download of self-hatred, was really upsetting. It made me hot and then cold and shaky and angry and sad. Thankfully the little angel was in the pool and didn't see her mother crying while staring at her hips.

It's since passed. I am aware that one thing that keeps the wolves at bay for me is staying in that five-pound range of normal BMI that has my clothes fitting without panty lines and me passing full-length mirrors without doing a double-take. I've been more careful this week about what I put in my mouth. But I also know that some parts of it -- the gravity parts, the cellulite parts -- may not be fixable by a sensible diet and exercise program. They may be part of 37. They may be part of my genetic code. I may actually not be able to do anything about the redistribution of what used to be higher on my frame. And I'm going to have to accept that, pronto. I am not going to spend the second half of my life being controlled by that feeling the way I spent the first half.

I AM NOT.