Water makes a mess.

Yes, I know water is supposed to be nice clean, calm, cool stuff that is essential to human life but.....too much of it is not a good thing.
We have had a little too much lately.
I suppose I should have been warned when the Senior Cat knocked over half a glass of water on the kitchen table. There were rather a lot of things on the table at the time - including Middle Cat's 'phone. I rescued the phone before any damage occurred to it and then had to clear up the rest of the mess. Some of the water had dripped on to the floor. It had soaked a bill that needed to be paid and... well, I'll leave it at that. 
The Senior Cat was upset at "being so clumsy"even though I had done my best to reassure him that it didn't matter. I mean, really it didn't. I dried the bill out and made sure he couldn't slip on the wet floor and just wiped everything else down. I didn't care.
But did that start the deluge. We had 72mm of rain here in the space of 48 hours - and then some more on top of that. We don't get that sort of rain in the normal way of things. The built environment is not built to cope with it.
There's a creek (brook/stream) not too far from us which is prone to flooding. They still haven't got around to doing the things they need to do to prevent this - partly because the environmental lobby started to object to parts of the plan and the government objected to the cost. Now of course it has cost a good deal more. The deluge across the state has, it is estimated, cost well over a billion dollars. That's just this state. The neighbouring one is in a worse mess. 
Yesterday it was  almost fine. I pedalled off to the library to pick up a book they had obtained for  me on inter-library loan. I was greeted with, "You didn't get washed away Cat? Do you know they had to sandbag the Senior Citizens' Centre?" 
The Senior Citizens' Centre is about 100m from the library and a little closer to the creek. Further upstream houses had been flooded and further downstream more houses were flooded. The library itself had remained dry but the ground around it was squelchy. 
I rode over the little footbridge and looked at the dirty brown swirling mass of water still rushing down. Work on a nearby building stop has come to a halt. They are flooded out too. That may actually cause them to rethink what they are doing there - or it may not.
I stopped to drop a prescription in to an elderly neighbour. He was eyeing his sodden yard and thanked me for bringing in his mail as well. It was still too wet and muddy for him to venture outside.
"Don't you go riding through floodwaters now will you?" he cautioned me. 
I had no intention of doing that but I wondered where the koala whose photo appeared on the front page of the paper had gone to stay while his tree dried out. I wondered whether the swallows who nest under the bridge were safe.
And there is more rain on the way!