Aaaaaaaah! & Grrrrrrr!

We've all had a HUGE week. Now that it's over we can take a little bit of a breather (three-day-weekend!) before things turn crazy again next week.

Suzanne taught her class on Flash Fiction. It was a lot of fun, and I think it turned out pretty well. She also got to spend some time with a writer friend of hers and found out that Munchkin has two new add-on packs! If you've never heard of Munchkin, it's a spoof on Role Playing Games, it's very irreverent, and it's a LOT of fun.

The garden is planted--and we found ourselves with about 100 sq. ft. with nothing planted in it. How did that happen? We plan to fill it with a few more rows of onion, plus beets (if I can find beet seeds this late in the season because I don't know what happened to the beet seeds I thought I had), and I'm not sure what else. My little baby tomato plants (which aren't such babies anymore--they're close to 2 ft. long) are finally in their beds. We planted some petunias, transplanted my Rose of Sharon shrubs to the garden they were intended to occupy when we bought them last year, and planted a hedge of lilac and Nine-bark along the fence between us and our neighbors. Privacy! Well, at least in a few years. The plants are little more than a foot high right now, but in a few years they'll be 8 ft. tall by 8 ft. wide! I can't wait!

The junk pile is gone!

The lawn is mowed!

The trees have little green fruits all over them!

Life is great...

...or it would be if I didn't have four HUGE fans buzzing away night and day in my living room right now.

This is the Grrrrrr! part.

Monday Ian and Darin went up onto the roof to get the swamp cooler hooked up. Everything went GREAT and we were enjoying the cool air on that hot day--UNTIL Hannah asked one of the most frightening question a homeowner can ever hear:

"Mom, why is there water on the floor?"

There wasn't much--or at least there didn't SEEM to be much. It was only a little yellowish puddle on the kitchen floor. My first thought was the refrigerator. So we pulled out the refrigerator only to hear the even more frightening sound of water dripped down between the walls behind the refrigerator!

Only one answer to the question now. The swamp cooler. It's the only source of water of any kind in the attic. While I hurried and shut off the water to the swamp cooler, Darin ran for the ladder. The copper supply tube to the swamp cooler had sprung a leak that sprayed water into our attic. We hoped it wasn't too much, but the final analysis is not great.

We've had the insurance man come and a disaster cleanup company come. In the end we had to pull the insulation up from the ceiling, where we found a 6 ft. by 8 ft. water stain running between four joists. The stain comes up against the main beam the runs the length of the house. That's where it started moving down through the walls. So our walls are wet, our ceiling is wet, AND it ran under the carpets over an even BIGGER area, ruined the hardwood floor and soaked through in a few places to the subfloor.

The disaster cleanup company came Thursday and spent half the day pulling up the carpet, ripping out all the wet carpet pad and damaged hardwood flooring, and installing these lovely fans. One is actually a dehumidifier. They have to run for 3 to 5 days, pumping air into the walls, under the floor, under the carpet, to dry everything out. They're LOUD!!! And they run ALL NIGHT!! Needless to say, we haven't slept hugely well, but we're getting used to it. And the living room is a jumble of furniture all shoved into the corner opposite the water damage. The piano is sitting in the middle of the room.

They told us today the fans will only need to run for one more day. Which means, really, they'll have to run until Monday at the earliest. We don't know if the crew will work on Monday, what with the holiday, so we might have to live with the fans until Tuesday. After that we'll be beset with restoration work. First they'll attempt to clean the carpet. If it doesn't clean I suppose we'll be getting new carpet, which will mean moving all the furniture OUT of the room. We're actually kind of HOPING to get new carpet--if that happens we're thinking of putting in enough extra money to recarpet the bedrooms, too. They'll also be replacing the carpet pad and hardwood flooring in the effected area, and patching and painting the walls.

THEN maybe we can restore our world to something akin to normalcy.

But then, it's us, isn't it? There's very little about life in the Vincent Vassalage that can be called normal.

And we LOVE it that way!