Sunday night... pillaging for a bit. Paul's had a migraine all day so he's been sleeping. Ben spent the night at a friend's place and didn't get home till mid-afternoon. Quiet day.
Friday we bought a new computer to replace my drowned one. Paul is working on tracking down a place to try to rescue the data from my old drive, otherwise it's all dead, Jim.
The basement is dry, swept and not smelling moldy.
This weekend was Bardic Madness, the biggest annual musical SCA event in the kingdom. Couldn't go.
*shrugs*
Take care, all.
The basement has been drained, emptied, sprayed, and is now getting dry. My husband did, by himself, the work of three hard-working men. I can’t lift or carry *anything*. I feel totally useless.
Now it’s time to start thinking about rebuilding. What do we want to *do* down there? I don’t think either of us will be at all comfortable putting anything that can be harmed by water anywhere near the floor… but since almost all our books are gone, we won’t need nearly as many bookcases for them, so I guess that works out.
The furnace is pretty much smack in the middle of the space. The stairs are beside the furnace. The oil tank and washer/dryer are over in one corner, near the drain and sumps. The rest is open (or potentially open, if we take out the 2x4 framing that’s there). I’m still attached to our idea of how we were going to do it in The Time Before the Flood. That makes Step One unhooking *that* idea, so I can think of other things.
Every crisis is an opportunity. Sometimes it seems to be an opportunity I don’t really want. Humph!
Heavy rain for several hours killed one of our sump pumps. The other couldn’t keep up. Our basement filled with water, to about knee-deep on Paul.
Paul will speak to his things, I’m sure, in his blog. My poor Paul… All but a few of his thousands of books and almost all of his comic book collection are in the dumpster we rented. And his anime costumes. As to mine…
Buddhists believe that suffering comes from attachment. Having to throw out books, photographs, papers and memorabilia from pretty much my whole life is a pretty deep lesson in how attached I am to this stuff.
The teddy bear I loved to fur-less-ness (Cynthia) weighs about 400 pounds… I don’t know what her stuffing is, but it makes an excellent sponge. She’s in the tub. Leaking. I doubt she’s rescue-able but I have to try. I expect to have to remove her stuffing and refill her… we’ll see how that goes. She is very threadbare… I might need to sew her some clothes to be her new outside.
There is a photo of Ben as a baby, in his Opa’s lap, as well as other older photos that I’ve got drying out. I’m hoping they’ll dry and be ok…
Most of our SCA scrolls and other artwork are trash. We can commission new scrolls, but two of mine were given to me by Alasdair when he was Prince… I’m sure he’s not signing scrolls anymore. One of those is on vellum. A couple pieces might be restorable, depending on the cost, of course. I imagine it’s prohibitive.
Most of my sewing miscellany will be in the dumpster tonight, though my machine is likely ok. But thread, patterns, trim, handouts from classes I’ve taken, toast. I’m going to try hand washing my linen, wool and silk embroidery flosses, and see if I can save them.
The furniture is pretty much all in the dumpster. Paul’s grandmother gave us a table and four chairs last year. The table and one of the chairs were downstairs, and so they, along with the rocking horse my dad made for Ben when he was little, are going for professional work.
Books touching on every area of interest I have ever pursued; music, language, meditation, massage, history… most of them are so wet they won’t even open any more. It is so *sad* to have to throw out books.
And there is so much more down there, wet, molding, destroyed.
Anyway. We’re ok and the house itself is ok. The plumber came and got everything drained, the furnace person said the furnace is ok and it’s running again, and someone is at the house repairing the water heater right now.
We didn’t like the carpet in the basement anyway.
Today is Paul’s last day in Orlando. He’s been there for two sessions of training about security for the web and some specific applications. He comes back today, but he’s been gone for 8 days, and that’s simply too long.
My back is getting stiff again, and the referred pain has returned, which means the injections will be necessary. I know they are effective on referred pain (they inject the anti-inflammatory so it goes inside the nerve root sheath, I think) but I don’t know what can be done about the disc pain. I don’t *think* they inject into that, but I don’t know. There used to be a treatment in which they injected some sort of presumably gel-like stuff into the disc, to plump it up, but they don’t do that anymore. I think the results weren’t very good. But this tells me they have done injections of a sort, into a disc. More research.
And that’s pretty much my life. Whee.