have you ever seen the rain?

That song has been looping through my head for the past several days. Well, one line of the chorus, anyway: "I want to know, have you ever seen the rain . . ." over and over and over! I think it's because it won't stop raining. Hmmm . . . maybe I should start singing "It's Raining Men"--it couldn't hurt :-)

We actually didn't have any rain today, which was really nice. There's lots of water just sitting around . . . some ditches had water in them a month ago. It just keeps raining! My parents' sump pump kicks on every three minutes or so. One of my coworkers said she has six inches of water in her basement! Boy, am I glad I live in a second floor apartment!

Some severe storms came through last night. Here in Nebraska, we tend to get rather blasé about storms because it seems we're constantly having severe thunderstorm and/or tornado warnings in the summer. The lightning started here around 5 p.m. . . . by that time, Kearney, which is about 1 1/2 hours west of us, had already been hit by a tornado. The same storm produced a tornado at Aurora, 20 minutes south of us. But when it was all said and done, we had rain--no hail, and no tornadoes. Sometimes, I just take for granted that God's going to protect us. Stephanie said she feels like Central City is invincible--we have warnings, but as far back as we can remember, we haven't had a tornado. Seeing the damage in Kearney and Aurora made me think about what I'd do if CC did get hit. And you know what? It's all just stuff. Would it be hard to lose my things? Of course! But life and the ones you love are so much more important than any thing you might own.

That said, last night I was much more concerned about being able to watch the season finale of LOST than about the threat of tornadoes (remember what I said about being blasé about storms?) Both the Kearney and Lincoln ABC stations were, with good reason, preempting programming in favor of storm coverage. Then the Lincoln station announced they would run the finale at 12:05 a.m. Of course, fanatics that we are, Val and I had to watch it. Then we had to discuss it for another 25 minutes. I got to bed around 2:45. Was it worth it? You bet!