Albertans are experiencing dreadful flooding, with thousands of homeowners being forced to leave their homes, vulnerable to the floods. There will be countless people who will have lost just about everything they value, but for their lives, when this natural disaster finally concludes.

We have little to complain about here, other than the incessant rain which, though it has impaired our normal enjoyment of late spring and early summer, hasn't caused any great hardships. In fact, crops here and gardens have hugely benefited from the rain. We woke to heavy rain yesterday morning and rain continued throughout the day.

We took advantage of one narrow window of opportunity when the rain became light enough so we could venture out for our daily ravine walk, clad in raingear. The light rain didn't bother us, but the mosquitoes and blackflies appeared to revel in those conditions and they certainly did bother us.

My husband spent most of the day in our garage, clearing it of the cars which remained in the driveway, taking advantage of an impromptu car wash under those rain conditions. He was busy cutting up a large sheet of plywood recently acquired for the purpose of building another bookshelf. Last week he and I struggled somewhat to move a bookcase he had built many years ago, from the studio in the basement to the upstairs floor of the house. We've too many books for our library to accommodate.

Despite the spillover bookcase in one of the back bedrooms. As it happened there was enough space in the hallway outside that bedroom beside a linen closet to welcome that bookcase. So there it sits now, half full of books already. And the replacement of the one that had sat for so many years downstairs is now being built so that the books and magazines that sat on the one upstairs can be replaced into a bookshelf again.

We viewed two films last night: Mile Zero and The Memory Thief. Intriguing films, both, but juxtaposed not guaranteed to result in an evening of lighthearted entertainment. Just incidentally, I looked at my email afterward, in the wee hours of the morning, to discover one message and attachment from a very old friend of my teen years. She had forwarded a link to a CTV video clip.

For the last perhaps 20 years my friend had been keeping steady company with a man who is a Holocaust survivor. He is now 94 years old, very active and alert, determined to continue getting as much out of life as possible. Every winter they travel together to Florida to spend the winter months there in comfort. The video clip was of a prom held at a synagogue last week, for Holocaust survivors.

It showed these elderly people vigorously dancing with their children, their grandchildren, getting the most out of life, faces lit with happiness and contentment at the dusk of their lives. My old friend's boyfriend was crowned King of the Prom.