Because Murphy hates us all: for those of you about to buy your first home, I recommend making sure you have the following items:
Big Push Broom
Good Mop/those rayon cloths that absorb lots of water
Wet/Dry Vac
For the first time in our married lives, we've had to deal with actual overflowing toilets and "washing machine accidents". Now the toilet has never overflowed on me...only on Josh and only when he's on his way to work. Go figure. However, yesterday I was enjoying a peaceful, relaxing afternoon doing laundry and other things. I got up to check on the laundry when I noticed a darker spot in the carpet in front of the door in our basement living area/office. I then noticed that the floor was glistening oddly past the door. The entire laundry room/entryway had about 1/2 inch of water. Quickly rescuing items like the vacuum and my bag of desk food for work, I called for Josh to come down and wandered into the laundry room to make sure the water wasn't coming from the ceiling or anything. It wasn't. After looking around a bit, I spied a black tube coming from the washing machine in the back not where it normally lives. The culprit. About 1 wash and 1 rinse cycle of water were now on our floor. Luckily, it was bleach water from washing the shower curtain....so not horribly dirty water. Josh found the push broom, which I had oh so smartly placed in the garage and I grabbed my keys and purse to head to purchase a wet/dry vac because it had become apparent that we needed to own one for this and future instances of water where it isn't supposed to be.
The amusing part of this story is that I had bought these "Amazin' Cloths" a few years ago (pre-married life) at one of those in-store promo things. I think Josh was with me that day and he mocked me for the $20 purchase of 3 large cloths and a mop. It's this rayon cloth that absorbs 17x it's weight in liquids from any surface, including carpet. I had bought them knowing my propensity for spilling things, like in college apartments where one does not want to pay for a carpet stain. Josh seemed rather amused by my impulse purchase and mocked for such. At least, as I remember it :-)
Anyways, it looks like we have definitely gotten our $20 worth and more out of the cloths as they saved us MUCH time yesterday after we had pushed and mopped up a good percentage of the water.
and that's what happened to my grand plan for taking pictures of a few of our generally set-up rooms....so, maybe next time. Especially since one of those rooms became reboxed as we had to move a large bookshelf away from the wall where the water had started to further dampen the edges of the carpet.
Apparently, Ike isn't done with our family and friends yet. (beware our New York peeps?) Our family and friends in the Ohio way are also without electricity and facing trees down. (I believe at least one of them had a tree come down on the house). So keep praying for everyone who has been in the path of Ike.
Well, first let me say that all my family fared pretty well in the storm. The Houston folks (uncles and grandpa) didn't flood and didn't have any trees fall in on their houses...but are w/o electricity (who isn't down there?) and have lots of debris clean-up. My uncle who burned his hands was still in a fair bit of pain and they were going to head to the doctors house to get him to check on them and get more pain medication...keep praying he continues to remain infection free which is a danger with burns. (Some were as serious as 3rd degree)
My older brother who lives in middle East Texas and works at a camp weathered the storm at the camp's chapel. Lots of trees came down, including one that took out his deck...but praise God! not the house. (there are LOTS of trees around his house)
Our friends in La Porte had no flooding but did have a tree fall down on one corner of their house, affecting a bedroom. The back window of the car they used to evacuate also took a hit. They too are without electricity and lost many trees as well as all their fencing.
I haven't heard that any of our Longview folk took any bad hits, so I'm counting no new as good news. I know that a fair bit of people are still without electricity.
Also, we made some progress unpacking boxes this weekend, and found that we still have lots of books and duplicates. We'll need to start going through the shelves and pulling some for goodwill or friends. We have a bit of shelving that still needs to go up and I'm itching to start hanging stuff on the walls.....blank walls bother me. It's never felt right until I get pictures hung up. We have enough done that I might brave a few pix to put online.
Oh, and I don't think I ever mentioned I now have the occasional tutoring job on the side. Homework support and ACT prep at a local educational center. and I've started back with BSF up here for "Life of Moses" and we'll be helping out at AWANAs at our church starting Wednesday!
So many of you know that we have friends and family in Houston. so that's the first prayer--for safety and such. All my family lives in the southern half of Houston....on the western side....
But, to make matters more interesting for my family: last night my uncle had a fire in the paint room at his shop. Thankfully, most of his crew had already left, but after they tried to put it out, there was an explosion (they think some paint dust blew up into the air) and some burning insulation fell on them as they were leaving. So the backs of his hands are pretty burned--which apparently was interesting to go get treated since so many of the health care offices and clinics had already shut down due to the oncoming storm.
After teh fire department got the fire out about 2 hours later, they had to go back and get what they could cleaned up....because if it floods, it could carry away some HAZMAT. Anyways, be praying for my uncle and his family, especially as this morning a mandatory evacuation has been announced.