Below you'll find some recent examples of writing that I'm proud of. If you'd like to see more, e-mail me.

Presidential Effort

For a moment, it looked like I might get a reprieve from playing Hooverball.

I was supposed to fill in for one of the armed forces teams taking part in an exhibition if I was needed. There were four: Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. But the Air Force team wasn’t there. And then, while they were getting together a second team of Marines, they asked if I wanted to play.

This wasn’t my first time playing, though. At last year’s Hooverfest, The Gazette fielded a team, and I played. But to say I’m not in the same category of fitness as Marines is a big understatement.

But I swallowed hard and took the field at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. Hooverball is a tough game &mdash essentially volleyball played with a six-pound medicine ball. That means you don’t hit the ball when it comes toward you,you catch it. Then you throw it over the net and hope your opponent doesn’t catch it.

The story is that President Herbert Hoover wanted a way to exercise, and would play the game every morning at the White House. If that doesn’t give you some respect for his physical fitness, then you’ve obviously never played the game.

This year, 24 men’s teams and six women’s teams competed in the tournament. The four courts buzzed with activity. The hardest part for Hooverball novices is serving, where you have to hurl the medicine ball from the back of the court over the net. The feat was even difficult for the Marines, and needless to say, it eluded me entirely.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to play long; a third Marine showed up, allowing me to take to the sidelines, where I really belonged in the first place.

Floodwaters scar downtown Cedar Rapids

Downtown was open again for business Tuesday — the business of cleaning up.

The area from Fifth Street to the Cedar River on the east side of town was opened in the morning, though the area remained without power and water, and the downtown bridges were closed.

The opening allowed people from establishments as big as Guaranty Bank and as small as The Garden Gate to assess what last week's flood had left behind or taken, what was damaged and what was safe.

Especially heartbreaking was the destruction inside the Paramount Theatre, 123 Third Ave. SE, a jewel of the downtown that's listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The theater's front doors were knocked over by the force of floodwaters. The Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ, installed when the theater opened in 1928, was tipped over and in pieces. The stage, coated in a thick layer of mud, bowed upward.

The theater, which underwent a $7.8 million renovation and expansion in 2003, is home to the Cedar Rapids Symphony. Alan Lawrence, a timpanist with the orchestra, had helped move almost all the symphony's percussion instruments to the second floor of the theater June 11, before the flood hit.

On Tuesday, he was back, armed with a flashlight. He spotted the high-water mark at 8 feet, a couple of feet below the instruments.

Outside, the downtown buzzed with the noise of generators running sump pumps and emergency lights. Workers dragged furniture out of damp buildings, leaving it on the curb to be carted away.

Rebecca Pflughaupt, who owns The Garden Gate, a flower store at 125 Third Ave. SE, with her husband, Dustin, was shocked to see the inside of her store. Mud was everywhere — on the carpet, the counters, the window ledges. The water left its mark 8 feet up on the walls.

"We imagined the worst," she said. "And it was worse than that."

Outside, where the sun could dry it, the pervasive mud took on the texture of concrete, hard and cracked. Inside buildings, it was thick, wet and slippery, sticking to shoes and making movement treacherous.

"We thought the sandbags would stop the sludge," Pflughaupt said.

The sludge and the water took its toll on the Guaranty Bank building at 302 Third Ave. SE as well.

Water went about 3 feet up the first-floor walls, according to bank President Robert Becker.

Workers were in the bank all day Tuesday, removing soaked drywall and carpet, pulling out ruined office furniture and trying to get wet papers into boxes so they could be preserved and salvaged.

Becker said he was worried about mold and bacteria causing health problems, so the bank is replacing nearly everything the water touched. The restoration company the bank hired said it would take seven days to clean out, and Becker figured the bank would be able to reopen within six weeks.

The bank's safe-deposit boxes, which are on the lower level, were still under water Tuesday, he said. Some people, he said, stopped in before the flood to collect their valuables, but most didn't.

"No one expected it to hit here," he said.

As soon as employees can get the boxes out, he said, the bank would set up a station for people to come and claim their things.

In front of Blend, a relatively new restaurant at 221 Second Ave. SE, a trailer was overflowing with tables and chairs. Andy Deutmeyer, a co-owner, said he'd hoped to save the chairs, but after a few days in the water and a few more in the damp air, they were starting to split apart.

The only thing that could be saved, he said, were non-porous items like plates and glasses. Employees and friends wrapped the breakable items in napkins and then loaded them into boxes.

Deutmeyer said he hoped the restaurant would be able to reopen but that it would be a long process.

Next door, the cleanup at the upscale Zins restaurant came to a halt around 3 p.m. when someone helping with the cleanup noticed the gas was still on.

Mary Kaye, who was helping clean out the restaurant, said that workers were about to cut the gas line to the deep-fat fryer when Tony Buck noticed the pilot light was still on and got everyone out.

"He's the hero of the hour," she said.

Ann Thelen, spokeswoman for MidAmerican Energy, said crews were called to the restaurant and were trying to figure out what had happened. Gas and electrical service had been cut to much of the flooded areas before the flood crest hit.

Businesses with space below ground fared much worse.

In the Cedar Rapids Piano Lounge, 208 Second Ave. SE, workers struggled to get heavy tables up the stairs and out of 5 or more inches of standing water.

Employee Sydney Readshaw was coated in mud and stood ankle-deep in water at the foot of the stairs. She said no one knew how much they could save, but they'd been told a lot of the tables would be OK.

"We're optimistic," she said.