I’m happy to say that in Pepperell, the flooding is not quite as worse 🙂 as the last time. I got out and ran the local errands I didn’t do yesterday, in the nick of time: as of 3:35 p.m. Mass. Highway has closed Rte. 119 again down by the farm stand, according to the police department website. The river isn’t nearly as high as the epic levels I recorded in my video, and is only forecast to reach about 12.5 feet by tonight and then start to subside. (In the video, the river is at about 15 feet. 8 feet is flood stage.) “Officially,” we got 4.34 inches of rain in this last storm.
Other places are faring much worse. Rhode Island is in very serious shape. A section of Interstate 95 has been closed (first time I’ve heard of an interstate highway closing for anything but a blizzard), and Amtrak has stopped some train runs. In Fall River, a whole street and its sidewalks have buckled and disintegrated.
Closer to home, a section of 119 had already been closed near Littleton because of a culvert collapse, a few days ago, and Ayer’s water supply is threatened because three of the town’s four pumps were inundated with water. I am SO glad I no longer commute to work in the Acton area, which I did when I first bought this house, because the only ways to get there that avoid Rte. 119 double the distance and time. I’ll bet some talk gets started about major upgrading of Rte 119 when all this excitement settles.
All of BLUM’s titles are now opted in at Smashwords for inclusion in the Apple iBookstore (as unenhanced ePub editions). I must have been one of the first Smashwords publishers to jump in because I was monitoring the site waiting for the buttons to go up and punched everything through at 4:00 a.m. this morning. 🙂 It will be very exciting if we’re actually in the iBookstore for the April 3 launch; no guarantees, though. Supposedly I’m all set (finally!) for the Sony store as well, I’m just waiting for Smashwords to “ship.” My dedicated ISBNs have been on the books for months, I wish I’d known that was the hold-up with Sony before now.