Here in Providence, the rain has stopped. The sky is a lighter shade of cloudy, and we're promised sun this afternoon. The temperature is supposed to go as high as 61F. So, improvements all the way round. We have been lucky. I think most of the city of Providence has been lucky. Looking at news reports and photographs, it's obvious that Providence is almost an island in the midst of the flooding. Part of I-95 has been closed indefinitely, and, at least as of yesterday, the Amtrak line to Boston wasn't running. We had black FEMA helicopters buzzing the city all day yesterday. My nerves are a little on edge from two days of constant sirens— fire trucks, police, ambulances. Spooky spoke with her mother yesterday, and their basement began taking water around 5:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, and her mom and dad had hardly slept since, using a shop vac to keep things as dry as possible.

We'd go to Moonstone Beach today, to get out of the House, but travel south is very slow and difficult at the moment, and we suspect that the road over the culvert connecting Card and Trustom ponds, which you must cross just before reaching the beach, has likely been overtopped, if not washed away. We'd try to get to Narragansett and Point Judith, but, again, I-95 is closed and the secondary roads are so backed up, people are being asked to avoid all unnecessary travel. And, truthfully, so much raw sewage (about 100 million gallons of combined sewage/rainwater...and fuck knows what else) has reached Narragansett Bay and Block Island Sound during the flooding, it'll be some time before the water's clean again. There's a ban in effect on shellfishing from Long Tree Point in North Kingstown, across Narragansett Bay past the southern tip of South Prudence Island to Carr Point in Portsmouth, until further notice.

So...yeah, we're okay. Most of Providence proper is okay. We went out late yesterday, to the market, and could see little sign of the flooding, except for the elevated level of the Providence River. We're lucky. The city is lucky. Much of Rhode Island has not been so fortunate. In a state where the unemployment rate was already at 13%, the economic impact of the flooding will be...well, it won't be good.

I did sleep almost eight hours last night, without Ambien.

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And here we are, a quarter of the way through 2010. Time moves so fast I can watch it speeding by me.

Sirenia Digest #52 will be going out to subscribers this afternoon. Vince sent me the illustration for "Houndwife" yesterday (it's gorgeous), and I sent everything away to Gordon to be PDF'd, and I had the PDF in hand around 9:30 last night. But then I began obsessing about a bit of formatting, and a new PDF is being generated. So, apologies for the delay, and I thank you for your patience. Here's the cover for #52 (featuring Carlos Schwabe's Spleen and Ideal, 1907-1908):