The two-week Kansas City triple-digit heatwave is preparing to break! Phew! I was pretty sure I was going to have to go to a desert soon to cool off.

WE ARE GOING TO FREEZE!

Despite the ridiculous heat, we've been spending almost all our nonworking hours outside. We eat outside, we play outside, we sit on the deck and read or play on the Internet outside. From time to time, I become aware of the heat wrapping around my body like a hot washcloth and the sweat seeping into my clothes. It's not the active sweat of a hard workout -- I always notice the minute I begin to sweat when I'm working out -- but the passive sweat of a body attempting to cool itself off as inobtrusively as possible. Lately it's been not until I get inside and my skin cries out for joy that I realize just how incredibly hot it is right now.

When I'm very cold, I'm a jumpy, grouchy mess, but when I'm very hot, I find myself floating along, almost disassociated from my discomfort. My body is definitely more calibrated for heat than cold. My mind and my soul don't want to spend one more minute inside than I have to before the cold returns to Kansas City and I explore every inch of the space inside my house in an effort to find something new to do that doesn't cost money until the weather breaks and I can go outside without shivering again. 

It may be hot, but the weather's going to have to throw even worse than 105 to keep me inside for very long. I'd rather just float.

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Read my review of Backjoy on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

As the Corolla sits stinking up my garage, Beloved is back in the Ozarks. And it's occuring to me I don't actually even know where. Have I learned nothing? I mean, I talked to him last night and this morning, and I forgot to ask both times. He was somewhere last night and he'll probably be somewhere different tonight, and after ten or twelve different times of him road warrioring his way across Missouri every week, I've grown more accustomed to this new life of ours. The only problem is my absent-mindedness. I have my head in my novel, and that means I forget to do stuff like turn on the coffee pot and ask my husband where he's sleeping.

There. I just texted him.

And printed my boarding pass for my flight tomorrow to Dad 2.0.

My parents will be here soon to be here for the little angel when she gets home from school because Beloved will get in late on Thursday.

I worry about my parents driving down here. I worry about Beloved driving around Missouri. I worry about me flying to Austin. But that's what people do. They move freely about, even though it's a dangerous world out there. It does no good to sit in your house and hide from that world.

When the worry comes, I try to imagine a big windshield wiper sweeping across my thoughts and pushing them away. Sometimes it helps.

Sometimes I just crawl back into the novel in my head, where I control whether or not there are tornadoes.

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.