Well, except the dragon, who lives just outside the castle, in the moat. But she sometimes puts her head through my window and talks to me, so she sort of lives inside. Sometimes. The turtles aren't technically inside any of the buildings, but they live in one of the courtyards, which is inside the castle walls, so that's okay. And I think the horses' stables count as a building, no matter what Earnest thinks.

My brother Earnest says I can't count the animals as people, but I don't know why I can't. They have names just like all the other people here, and are a lot more fun to play with. But Earnest is very serious all the time. He doesn't believe in pretending or imagining things, and tells me not to be so silly. I suppose it's because he's the oldest of us, and will be the King someday, so he has to concentrate a lot and learn to be wise so that he does a good job. But I think he would be much wiser if he practiced playing sometimes, too.

Earnest won't have to be the King for a long time, anyway. That's my father's job. My mom's the Queen, and she's really good at it. She and my dad are on a tour of the kingdom, so they aren't here in the castle just now. That's why all of our aunts and uncles and cousins are here living with us.

When my parents were packing up for their trip, my mom gave me this diary, so that I could write down everything that happened while they were away. She says that someday I'm going to be a Chronicler, so I need to learn how to describe things and explain them for other people to read. I think it would be more fun if my diary could talk back to me, though. After all, if I were trying to explain something to people, wouldn't they ask me questions?

It started raining right after breakfast. It rained all morning, straight through lunch, stopped just long enough for me to run outside and rescue the turtles before their colony became a pond, then poured all afternoon, through supper, and into the wee hours of the morning. I've never seen it rain so much water in one day. (Fergus - he's the gardener - says he hasn't seen it before, either.)

Usually it takes a whole week or more of rain before the dungeons start to get a bit soggy, but they were a couple of inches deep with water before I got up for breakfast the next day. You might not think this was such a problem if you've only ever read about castles, but let me tell you, when you live in one, it's quite a different matter.

Storybooks always describe dungeons as dark, dank, musty places, with iron chains attached to the walls, locks on all the doors, skeletons in the corners, and smelly straw on the floor. Other than that, they're supposedly pretty much empty.

Castle life would be much easier if that were actually the case.

You have to understand, one thing castles DON'T have is closet space. You can put old oak wardrobes into the bedchambers, but it's not quite the same thing. And have you ever tried attaching shelving to solid stone walls? So storage is rather a problem, if you want to keep things organized in any sensible way.

But if you have dungeons that run underneath the entire castle, you can put wooden benches along the walls from one end to the other, and lay things out very neatly, so that everything is easy to find when you need it, without being in your way upstairs. They're spacious, dry, sheltered from the weather, and you couldn't ask for better security.

Except when the moat floods. Which is isn't supposed to do. Except it did. By lunchtime on the second day, the water was two feet deep...and COLD. Luckily Maggie, our moat dragon, knows how to breathe fire underwater, which helped warm things up quite a bit without singeing anybody.

It's a good thing Mom and Dad aren't going to be home for a while. It's going to take a long time to get everything dried out and cleaned up. Although, having so many cousins around to share the work will help a lot. (Plus, it will keep them too busy to pick on Maggie. She can take care of herself, of course, but it usually results in at least second degree burns for whoever's foolish enough to try...)

You would think that nine plumbers would be sufficient to handle a flooding moat. Yet there we were, wading through all that water in the dungeon, and not a plumber in sight. I finally sent Maggie to sniff them out (she's very good at tracking, although tight spaces can be a problem).

They're all sick in bed. Nine plumbers, and every single one of them has mumps! They look like a pack of chipmunks, with their cheeks all puffed out, and when we asked them for advice about how to drain the floodwaters, we couldn't even understand what they said because of their swollen throats.

Old Breezy (that's Breasal) was beside himself. Technically, he's the butler, but when Mom and Dad are away, he tries very hard to ensure that everything keeps running smoothly in their absence. And, of course, the only thing that has been running smoothly since the flood started is the stream of water into the dungeon.

It's not that I mind helping to move everything to a higher spot or spreading things out to dry in the Great Room. But it does make it very difficult to find time for lessons, which he finds quite perturbing. So, he's pulled out all the plans and diagrams of the drains and moat and local waterways, and is busily trying to work out the best way to deal with our soggy problem on his own.

Meanwhile, the rain has finally stopped. The flow of water into the dungeon is starting to slow, so hopefully there is an end in sight. It will be a relief, to get things back to normal. I've been wearing the only pair of galoshes I could find, which are two sizes too large for me, so every other step, my foot comes right out, and then the galosh falls over, and gets full of water, which pretty much defeats the purpose of wearing them in the first place. I've washed more socks in the past week than in the whole previous month.

I think Maggie was relieved at the request, because you could just see how badly she felt when the socks hit the mud for the third time. It wasn't really her fault - after all, dragons weren't designed to have fine control over their flaming abilities. They're more of a "big picture" species. So, she moved over to turtle territory, and we washed out the socks. Again.

After that, it was either run around barefoot, or make more socks. Three of my uncles set to work around the hearth in the Great Room, their needles clicking and sliding and whishing until it sounded like a small cloud of insects had descended to warm themselves in front of the fire.

I'm hopeless with knitting needles. I keep poking my fingers, and dropping stitches, and getting my yarn tangled up in knots, and everything takes me five times as long as it should. I'm pretty good at crochet, but for some reason no one seems to have figured out a pattern for crocheting socks...

While the uncles were knitting, one of the plumbers finally staggered downstairs to the dungeon to assess the situation. He staggered back upstairs an hour later, looking rather like death warmed over, and we immediately hustled him back to his bed and fed him soup. The upshot of his inspection seems to be, someone has been trying to dig a new tunnel down there, and dug a little too close to the moat, so when the rain raised the level of water in the moat, the excess happily poured through the new digging, which eroded a whole section of foundation, and we're lucky the entire castle didn't collapse with a mightly splash.

Earnest took this very personally (after all, it will be his castle someday), and commenced a Grand Inquisition of all the siblings and cousins. I think he would have questioned the aunts and uncles as well, if Uncle Theodore hadn't sternly suggested that questioning his elders about a tunnel only large enough for a small child or two was not only impertinent, but silly.

Earnest went off to the Royal Study in a bit of bad temper. Uncle Theodore had a quiet word with Fergus, who is much more likely to ferret out the culprit than my brother, and no doubt the whole matter will be cleared up by the morrow. In the meantime, I am curled up in my pajamas and a new pair of dry socks, toasting myself against Maggie's warm (if scaly) side, and toasting marshmallows in the heat of her snores. Life is good.