The key is to keep things in the proper perspective, as it is with most things in life. We just came out of a mini-drought, with very little rain at all for weeks, and the rain of the last week has replenished our water supply.

As the forecast worsened, I was confident. I’d just redone our basement work space that had flooded twice before, putting heavy-duty waterproof paint on the floor and up to the ground line and sealing the previously-unsealed holes in the concrete that were evidence of some previous owner’s battle with termites. We were ready with a pump in case it did flood. I’d redone the draining system, the failure of which had caused the first two floods. We were ready.

Sunday morning, though, we found water in the basement. Not much, but a bit. By the time I had gone back upstairs to change into more appropriate attire and had returned, there was noticeably more water. Significantly more water. I scanned for the source, but it didn’t seem to be coming from corner that was the usual source. I soon discovered the breach: one of the termite-poison-injection points had been compromised: water was literally bubbling out of the small hole as if it were a spring. I plugged it with a wine cork and set up the pump, only to discover that the two or so inches of water was not enough to trigger the pump. No fear: we had plenty more water in the crawl space and a shop vac. In the end, I pumped probably seven or eighth hundred or so gallons out of the crawl space at about two hundred gallons out of the work room.

The nicely-painted floor, though, was a wreck. But the overall damage was minimal, and the situation could have been much worse:

• We had power.
• We had a working pump to empty the crawl space.
• We had a working shop vac to suck up the water that’s too shallow for the pump to draw up, which was basically all the water in the basement — but still.
• Even if it totally flooded the basement, nothing down there was critical to daily living or irreplaceable.
• The living area living of our house was highly unlikely ever to flood at all.

By the time we got the basement situation under control, the only real concern was the forest in the backyard. With such saturated ground and such relatively strong winds, everyone was saying that the compromised root systems of trees wouldn’t hold indefinitely. But they all held, and we escaped with no damage to speak of.

Throughout the day, the routine was the same:

• Grade some papers.
• Check the water level in the basement.
• Hang out with the kids a while.
• Repeat.

We all knew that the situation was worse the closer one got to the shore. When the pictures of the damage started appearing on the Internet, though, it was far beyond anything we’d expected.

So today, we went about our normal routines, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thankful for the ability to go to work this Monday morning.