What a week!!

On Sunday morning Zesa ( that is what Doogie calls her) called us to the basement because
water was coming up the drain near the washer. I grabbed the shop vac and tried to suck it up. I also started putting towels down thinking I could contain it to one area. J went to the hardware to find a pump so if it got real bad we could pump it. It seems like he was gone for ever. It was coming in faster than Zesa and I could clean it up. I called T&P to see if they could come and help and if the knew any one with a pump. They were trapped in their subdivision, the water was worse by them. I called some friend to help and they came with buckets, shop vacs and two other guys to help. All this time J is still trying to find a pump because they were gone from the shelves in the stores. We started a chain of people up the stairs 6 of us and passed buckets up
the stairs to empty them out side. It is still pouring out there. That did not help. One funny moment that happened to my friend Joanie, she is always saying she is a princess and can't do alot of things around the house, so her husband helps her alot, but she was being a trooper and was helping us bail the water outside. The water is a dirty brown and we are not really sure if it is sewage. Joanie and I were on the bottom floor filling buckets and handing them to everyone one on the stair steps. Zesa's handle on her bucket broke and the water went all over Joanie on her head and everything, she yelled out "Hey you guys remember I'm a princess" I just laughed at her and said, You've been de-throned.. We had to laugh or we would just cry.... They called our friend Donna and she came over with a pump and hooked it up. J finally got home, the only thing he could find was a pump that you would use to pump water from a swimming pool. After a while he hooked that up also and ran that one too. The water was coming in faster than the two pumps could pump it. By now the whole basement was in about 4 inches of water. We tried to put everything up high, but still had shelves and such on the floor that we could not put up. I went outside to check on our neighbor and to move the hose that was from the sump pump so that the water would go to the street. I was soaking wet, because the rain was still coming down. The neighbor gave me another pump and hose, so I gave it to Zesa and she hooked it up to the other side of the basement. Three pumps and four hoses going out to the street and it was still coming up... As the water was coming up some of my 18 gallon containers that I have holiday items in tipped over and was floating all over.. some got water in them. The rain stopped about 4 hours later and the the water went down in the street. The water was over the bottom step in the basement. It was still pumping it out but the water was coming in and it was only keeping up enough so that it did not get deeper. We kept the pumps running all day.. the neighbors brought us burger king for lunch, and we just waited for the water to go down. J and Joanie brought us dinner and sat with us for a while. At 11:00 pm the water was gone, but the mess!!!!!!!!!!!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

taking a break

Well as I am cleaning down stairs I am sad that I have lost things such as pictures and books that I bought when my children were small, dating back 35 years... then said to myself get over yourself, there are so many people that have more water than us that can not even get back in there homes. On the front page of the news paper yesterday was a women in waders passed her waist, crying as she looks at her home under water and it is higher than her basement.
Also a father in his 70's and his son in his 40's that were killed as they were trying to save a young boy in a near by town that was being swept away. The child was saved, but the men died. So sad here, you sometimes get caught up in your own problems and there are some that are going through so much more. We were one of the lucky ones. I heard at work last night that some houses were blowing up because of gas leaks..... so scary

The clean up

J took the day off Monday, he went to the insurance co. with the pictures I took to see what they could do for us, they said to just put the wet items separtate from the dry and try to figure out what we lost. They put most of the dry items in the garage and wet thing in the drive way.. I keep thinking that people are going to come by thinking we are having a yard sale. When I got home I went through the containers that had tipped over to see if water got in, then we sorted that stuff.
The next day we both had to go to work, Zesa worked on it all day , she hauled all the big furniture up the stairs by herself, full of water and I'm sure she hurt herself. J got the hot water going and I washed a few things and washed some of the floor before going to bed. The bad part is that some of the area was hit harder than us, so coming home from work was an 1 1/2 hours getting home with the traffic backed up so I did have much time to help. I had to work at 12:30 on Wednesday, so I told Zesa to rest her back because I would be off Thursday & Friday and could work on it. She did not listen, when I got home she had moved things over to one side of the basement, and had scrubbed the walls and floor with soapy bleach water. J helped her to get more of the wet items out side. She then went to T&P"s house to spend the night about 8:30 pm
so she could watch Doogie on Thursday. She will be back on Friday, so I'm going to get as much done as I can so she can rest... she has worked so hard, don't know what I would have done without her. So my day begins, working in a stinky basement.......