By popular demand (BtC wants a mug) here are updated links to the cafepress.com stores for The Bug merchandise. The mug is currently available only in English. It looks like cafepress.com is changing the URLs to cafestore.com/storeid. And it also looks like they’re having a sale on some merchandise.

Newest store is here.
In English.
In Dutch.
In French.
In Swedish.

At the Shoe Project. If you haven’t already submitted shoes, well, okay.

New Get your War On.
[Via peace dividend]

As you know, we don’t have a television, so we were probably the last people to see images of the flooding here in Austria. We just got back from my wife’s parents’ house where we watched the news.

It’s really bad. Two good things, though: the rain is letting up and there has been a fairly large wave of solidarity throughout Austria, with many people donating money and goods (blankets, refrigerators, etc) to help the people who’ve lost everything, and there are several thousand of them. On the negative side, though, although smaller creeks and rivers are beginning to recede, the Danube is still rising because some smaller dams and dikes that had held up are finally beginning to break, and there is new flooding in Bavaria and the Czech Republic (parts Prague under water, etc). And all that water eventually flows past my house.

But it looks like the worst is over in Austria.

I stayed home from work today in case I would need to pump out my cellar or otherwise perform flood-related activities. I went out in the morning and took some pictures of the creek that flows past my house, it is a tributary of the Danube [ouch, a tortoise is biting my foot]; later in the morning, I went to the bank to pay some bills and took some pictures of the Danube. In the pictures, water levels are way up from normal. Another six feet, about, and we’d have serious flooding. They continued to rise a little during the day, two or three feet, but seem to have stabilized now.

The creek near my home. Same creek.
View of the Danube
(The town of Tulln in the background.)
Another view of the Danube, from the Tulln side.

The Bug comes in second after Coppertone on this search..

It’s not juvenile, it’s funny.

It’s been raining quite heavily in most parts of the country, including mine, and the ground is finally saturated, meaning there is no place for the water to go anymore but into your cellar. We were concerned last night, Gamma most of all, she has a phobia of flooding (when she was younger and telling past-life stories, most of her deaths involved drowning) and couldn’t get to sleep. I read a book, and when I wanted to go to bed saw that Alpha, Beta and Gamma were all sleeping in the big bed, so I went to Beta’s bed and read another 30 minutes before finally going to sleep around 1. Got up at 5.30 and checked water levels in the street etc. Things had, in my area, calmed down overnight and water had never actually come into our cellar, and I never needed to use the pump I bought several years ago when water did actually flood our basement and I swore I’d get a good pump.

It is interesting how a catastrophe brings out the best in people. Yesterday, for example, when the rain was the heaviest, just streaming down, and our back yard was mostly submerged, totally saturated with about an inch of water on top and water was beginning to seep into the drain in front of the cellar door, I noticed our neighbor bailing water out of in front of her door and throwing it into our backyard. Alpha and I went to the fence and asked her wtf she was doing, and to please not be putting even more water onto our property, where it would seep into our house, but into the street where it could drain away.

“I’ve had to buy new furniture three times,” she explained. Good for you, I thought. “Listen,” I said, “I have a pump. You’re welcome to use that until my cellar starts flooding and I need it.” She said, in an irritated tone, no, another neighbor was bringing over a pump. I told her to be sure and let me know if she changed her mind.

I had this idea for a redesign, and D came up with images and a layout and some good ideas of his own. I’m currently tinkering with the code, so if this blog suddenly