I Sure Hope FEMA has improved since 2005

My sister, niece, and nephew are visiting for the weekend.   I knew there's flooding in Iowa, but I didn't realize how bad it is until I heard on the radio that one of the hospitals in downtown Cedar Rapids had evacuated.  It turns out that this was the hospital that my sister had been working in up until this week.  She's about to start her second year of a 2 year radiology program that includes extensive clinical experience.  So, if she hadn't been visiting Chicago, she probably would have been stacking sandbags against the hospital doors and moving patients out their rooms and into waiting ambulances.  She starts at a different hospital on Monday, where she'll probably be doing a lot of clean up for the first couple of weeks.

Fortunately, my sister, niece, nephew and parents all live on high ground, so their homes are safe.

I didn't find out that Tim Russert had died until a few minutes ago.  :(  I know a lot of people are saying he went too easy on members of the Bush administration, but I watched tons of MSNBC coverage (I was stuck in the hospital with insomnia and nothing else to do) of the 2004 election and was always impressed by him.