How to disassemble and apt. in 30 minutes without even trying

So I'm driving to work Wednesday morning when brother Brad calls asking what I'm doing. The standard "on my way to work" was my reply and he mentioned that maybe I should rethink that idea. The Missouri river, she was a risin and he was on his way to help some friends sandbag. Yeah, I'd known that the river was up, but in your mind you never think it's going to reach you. The closest I'd ever been to flooding was sometimes in the spring growing up Cutbank Creek would spill its banks, but that was kinda cool to see and it meant that it would bring some Northern Pike down from Canada for us to fish on all summer. I'm still not sure if we caught 40 fish a day or 1 fish 40 times a day, but it was fun.

When I got to work things were definitely amiss, people were standing around, talking on the phone and making moves for the door. At that point I informed my boss that I don't swim well and I better get stuff out of the apartment before I was forced to scuba dive for it.

Katie was still at home when I got there and she was a little surprised when I told her to start throwing clothes into garbage bags. Over the next two hours my phone rang about 157 times wondering if I needed help. As much as I needed help I knew there were people in a lot more danger than we were so I tried to pass on as much of it as I could, but finally my old roommate Nichol called and said they were just down the street moving Kaylan and her friend Brittani out of their condo and wanted to know if we needed help. In about 30 minutes we had all of the furniture up on the counters, computers and TV's moved out and enough clothes to get us through a couple days if need be. So first of all, thanks to Nichol, Steph, Nancy, Brian, Brittani, Dawn and everyone else that helped out. Also thanks to Brad, Nancy, Tyler and Cam for a place to stay that night. Tyler does a really good job of preheating an oven for pizza, but gets off task when there are computer games to be played. No pizza's were burned tho. Here is a pic of the apt.

You'll notice in the picture that Rudy got top billing on top of the fridge. Katie originally left him on his old spot which was about 2 feet off the ground. He doesn't swim well so I moved him higher. Also notice in the lower right corner that we were able to save the playdough. I was a scared for the playdough

Katies brother also came over a little later on when I was getting ready to leave and we made sure that we got the guns out there. If someone had come by they woulda thought we was gettin a posse together to take on the flood. 5 guys standing outside with shotguns and rifles is a pretty cool site. Most of them were scared of the guns though.

The big worry was that an ice jam north of Bismarck near Double Ditch was going to break loose and the river would really rise. Once the Blackhawk helicopters and police started to swarm the Marina Bay area I started to get really nervous. I figured I better go help somewhere so I tried to go to the Civic Center to help make sandbags, but it was a zoo there, so I went over to Mandan to help there instead. As fun as 5 hours of sandbaggin sounds, it's not and I'm still a little sore 3 days later.

Here is a pic of the effort. The one guy circled in the pic didn't help much at all. He liked to stand around a lot.

Things are back to normal now. We decided that we didn't like how the furniture looked on the counters so we moved them back to the floor. Rudy has reclaimed his spot beside the chair and the playdough is still sittin on the kitchen stool.

Floods are not fun so much and I think I'll buy out of the flood plain when I buy a house.