OK, I promise you this is all related.

Last night I had two voicemails.  One from Dad, one from Grams.  The one from dad was entirely confusing, but it told me to call Grams, so I did.

Grandma had quite the little story.

Yesterday she was waiting in the lobby of a building waiting for a pouring rainstorm to let up.  She stood there by the door with a gentleman, a salesman of some sort, and struck up a conversation with him.  They started with rain and moved to the flooding in Iowa.  Cedar Rapids, specifically.

“My son’s office was destroyed by the flooding,” Grandma said.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” said the salesman.

“Yes, he took some pictures of his office after the flood waters abated, and then my granddaughter (that’s me, folks) put them on CNN‘s website.”

The salesman paused.  “iReport?” he asked

“Yes…” Grandma said.

“OH!”  He cried, “I look at those pictures every day!  I sit there and I feel so sorry for that man who lost his office, and I wonder how he’s doing!”

Grandma was shocked.

“And now I can go back to my office and tell all my co-workers that I met his mother!” He gushed.

Wow.  Wonders never cease.  They seriously never do.

Anyway, Grandma was able to assure the strangely fixated salesman that Pops was OK.  I’m not sure if he’ll continue to look at the pictures every day now or not, but it seems kind of odd to me.

I promised you that this post was related, though.

So in the flood, Dad lost this photo collage that we kids made for him several years ago.  We ran around Des Moines, the kids ran around their respective towns, and we all took pictures of signs which had the word “Douglas” on them.  Joey photo-shopped them all together and we gave it to Dad for either Father’s Day or his birthday, I forget which.

The “Douglas” got left on the wall in Dad’s office because original estimates said there would be 2 feet of water, max, that got inside the building.  When he woke up the next morning to find 5 or 6 feet of water, it was too late for the “Douglas”.

Immediately, we sibs went into action.  We knew we’d have to recreate the “Douglas”.

Joey and I had deleted all of our pics from the first “Douglas” last month, of course, and we frantically searched our backup hard drive.  Fortunately, they were there.

Andrew had the great idea to assign each of us kids a letter of Dad’s name (since there are seven of us now!) and to somehow figure out how to make that letter with our bodies.

Joey and I went to Michael’s and found photo cubes that we thought would work perfectly for the new and improved D.O.U.G.L.A.S.  We bought seven.

The front face of each cube would be the letter made by us kids.

(Joey & I, Laura, Stephen, Joey & I, The Kid, Sister & Stephen, Brother)

Seven signs with “Douglas” on them.  (OK, the Pepsi one was a photo-shop special done by Andrew.)

One side had a picture of each of us couples.

(Joey & I, Andrew & Laura, AshleyNicole & Stephen, Me & Joey, The Kid & Caitlin, AshleyNicole & Stephen and Andrew & Laura)

Another side had (mostly) individual shots of us kids.

(Joey, Laura, Stephen, Me, The Kid, Sister, and Brother…with The Kid looking snidely on.)

More Douglas signs to boost Dad’s self-image.

And more pictures of his monsters.

(Joey, Laura, Stephen, Me, The Kid, Sister and Brother)

The package arrived last night.  Mom hid it until the evening, at which time Pops tore the wrapping paper off and discovered his new and improved D.O.U.G.L.A.S.

Poor Dad still doesn’t have much of an office, so nowhere really to put his new D.O.U.G.L.A.S., but someday he will.  And when he does, he has something for his wall.

Take that, Great and Evil Flood of 2008!