My wife and daughter were on rake and removal. Little man had the shovel and wheelbarrow and did a great job going down the curb. I fired up the lawn mower and made a mess with a combo of its mulching ability, bagging capability and general ease of spitting leaves into the woods. Then I doubled over the entire yard – essentially mowing the week before Christmas.

It was still pretty wet. Leaves were packed and stuck. The yard was a mess, but we made an impact. It at least looks like we care now. It’s really only three months (probably less) until we need to start thinking about maintaining outside again. I hope we can get on top of it. That’s the one place I feel like we’ve let things go since we moved it. We started off strong that first spring/summer and then just petered out. It really needs some attention. I’d like to get some curb appeal going.

So to start thinking Xmas and maybe start scoping trees we decided to go check out our local Christmas Tree Shoppe. We knew a little about it and had been wanting to check the place out for a while. Well, our mistake for not looking into it more, but it’s probably the worst place in the world. I expected a cute little seasonal holiday-type place. It’s actually essentially a Big Lots with 1/4 of the store filled with seasonal holiday items of the Big Lots quality you’d expect. It fucking sucked. If it burned to the ground tomorrow, I’d chuckle with approval. I actually wished I were in a Big Lots. (for the record, Big Lots is one of my least favorite places on Earth)

Just a big fucking waste of time.

We noticed there was a Burlington Coat Factory in the plaza. We hadn’t been to one in ages, but we used to find pretty great deals at the one in Allentown when we lived there.

Mistake #2.

It smelled…mostly like sad. And there was absolutely nothing worth seeing there…except (and I swear we found these there) for the boys mustard yellow courduroy pants straight off the kids in early-70′s Sesame Street episodes. I had flashbacks.

We quickly slipped out of there and beelined to the other location we planned on hitting – Hobby Lobby. I don’t think I’d ever stepped foot in one prior to this. We saw an ad that said they had a buttload of trees in all shapes and sizes at great prices. It may have been a bit of an oversell. They had one 12-footer, but it didn’t look very real and was a bit bare…and even with the 50% off sale on all Christmas decorations, still came in at a price closer to four digits than two. Meh.

What a waste of a couple of Friday hours.

On Satuday, we had football equipment turn-ins in the morning, then my son and I decided to drive across town to see one of the semi-final tournament games. Looked to be possibly the best game of the entire tournament at the 4th grade level. One team was a sleeper that went undefeated and gave up just one touchdown in the 8-game season and only two TD’s in three tournament games. No one ever put up more than 6 against them. They were playing the team that has been a thorn in our side not just once, but twice in the past. They’re consistently good and passed us in the final week of the season for the highest scoring team in the 4th grade.

On paper it was the unstoppable force against the immovable object.

It didn’t play out that way. The sleeper team gave up 28 points. In one game they gave up more TD’s than they had total in the 11 games prior. We still had fun. Might go to the championship game at UD next weekend.

It was also my daughter’s birthday. I have a 14 year old. Her party was last weekend, so she got to spend the day alone while my wife was at work and my son and I were at the game. She got a cake from Ritters. She wanted a Mud Pie cake. Too chocolatey for me. A weird little quirk of mine is that I’m not fond of chocolate ice cream. Even worse, chocolate ice cream with more chocolate shit mixed in…and then topped with more chcocolate. Not my thing. But Ritters is awesome. It took us a while to discover them (we’re DQ people for childhood), but we haven’t been to DQ in ages. (for the record my very favorite ice cream is Whitehouse)

Tomorrow? Little stuff around the house and a Steelers game tomorrow night. Normally we rake/blow leaves the first weekend in November, but all the leaves haven’t fallen yet. Trees are still surprisingly full for this late in the year. Maybe next weekend.

I’m livin’ it.

Then once it did finally really warm up last week, it got stupid hot (high 80′s) and humid, so I turn the air on for three days. Then the temperature plummeted and now I have the heat on with highs in the low 50′s. Just really weird weather patterns going down this year making it hard to get outside and get shit done – which is something we had big plans for this spring.

Looking ahead to try to find some breaks, AccuWeather has this for the next 15 days

26th – Thunderstorms
27th – Thunderstorms
28th – Mostly Cloudy (but chilly with a high of 55)
29th – Mostly Sunny (63)
30th – Partly Cloudy (73)
1st – Partly Cloudy (67)
2nd – Rain
3rd – Cloudy (58)
4th – Showers
5th – Rain
6th – Rain
7th – Rain
8th – Rain
9th – Rain

What the fuck? Hopefully a forecast that far out doesn’t hold up because I need this to dry up…we’re actually getting moss all around the yard. I can’t see me having to wait until mid-May to get out and really start getting the lawn together.

I wonder what kind of omen that is?

At some point, my son (who was somewhere in the house doing something) came to us and asked what the flashing outside was. We kinda dismissed him with a quick answer about lightning. Maybe heat lightning, maybe a storm. No biggie.

A few minutes later he comes back with a, “No really. What is this out there. Come look.”

So we go to the entry and look up out the big front window and the sky is just lighting up over and over. So we open the door and step out. The flashing is almost constant and very localized. It keeps happening in essentially the same part of the sky. At first we thought it was fireworks relatively close lighting up the low, overcast sky. But that was quickly dismissed as there were no booms. The trees in the front were still blocking the view so I walked out to the end of the yard.

Basically as nutty-ass lightning storm thingy was brewing to the north of us. It was mesmerizing. Flashes of light punctuated by streaks that seemed to trace the outline of the clouds. After a few moments, I realized this was one of those rare opportunites where you have great lightning views and no rain. Photos!

I busted into the house and ran to the basement to find my tripod. Got back upstairs and grabbed my camera, put it on the tripod, snapped in the remote and got back outside.

What I didn’t think of is that it was a comfy 72 with no humidity inside (courtesy of modern air conditioning), but a tropic 78 with 100% humidity outside. The camera fogged up…bad. I stood there watching the storm and cursing the camera. The storm seemed to be moving in a southeast direction meaning that while it was moving from behind the neighbor’s trees into the unobstructed northeast sky, it was also slowing moving towards us as it swept across the sky. After about 10 minutes or so, my camera was not even close to settling in to the outdoor conditions and the first raindrops started falling. I grabbed everything and by the time I hit the door, it was a torrential downpour.

I was pissed at the missed opportunity to capture that fucked up lightning, but glad I went out and saw the free light show.

Would’ve made some really neat photos though…

And yes, that’s a top-down look at a portion of the wall.

On Friday night around 2am I was in the back room of the basement (designated as my little play area) putting some files from my old PC on an external drive to move them to my new PC. All was good.

On Saturday morning, I awakened to the sounds of the kids yelling about the basement being flooded. Usually not a big deal except that we have about 800 square feet of totally finished basement that this has supposedly never happened to in the past. I make my way to the basement and am met with some seriously sloshy carpet. My first thought is, “How the hell did this much water get down here in just 8 hours…and after the rain stopped on Friday evening?”

After a few quick phone calls we checked the sump pump. It appeared to be working fine. There was water in the well, but it never overflowed and the pump was at least keeping pace. Our insurance company apparently doesn’t handle shit on weekends and told us to try to keep the mess to a minimum and an adjuster would call on Monday.

We called the guys who do carpet cleaning and clean-up for my wife at the hotel and they sent someone out immediately. The dude hit the basement and was like, “Whoa!” I think he expected a little leak and we were working our way to indoor pool by noon. He called out some additional help and they got to sucking up water. It turned out to be a futile effort, it seemed to be coming from everywhere and as fast as they sucked it up, more was there. They did the best they could and left late in the afternoon. We spent the rest of the weekend with fans, blowers and a shop vac trying to keep the water to a minimum. At it’s peak, you could step on the carpet and push down with your foot and get a puddle of water to form that covered your shoe.

On Monday we talked to the adjuster and he pretty much wanted to blow us off – kind of like, “You had a leak and your carpet got wet. We’re not paying for new carpet.” But we insisted it was a must-see situation and he agreed to come by and look on Tuesday. We spent Monday evening pulling carpet and pad from the basement and finally started realizing how much water had really come in.

On Tuesday the adjuster showed up and even with half the basement cleared of the sopping wet carpet he took one look around and said, “Whoa! The whole basement is soaked.”

He did his adjusterly duties and left us kind of hanging with no answer or suggestion other than to try our home warranty people. So we called them and they said we might be covered depending on the cause and the damage. They said they’d have a guy out on Thurday. We spent Tuesday night getting the rest of the carpet and pad out and kept up with the fans, blowers and shop wav doing our best to dry it out, but the smell was bad. On Wednesday it was more of the same – trying to air out and dry out the floor walls, doors – everything was damp, musty and generally shitty.

On Thursday the warranty people’s guy showed up and after a lengthy inspection came to no real conclusion beyond a drainpipe or two being less than optimal. He said he’s send his report to the warranty people.

We called the adjuster back and were like, “So what the fuck is going on?”

His reply was that until we figured out what the issue was, he couldn’t say whether we were covered or not. So he said he’d send out some engineeer crew on Friday.

Today those guys showed up and, of everyone we’ve dealt with, they seemed the most knowledgable and useful. After a full basement and outdoor inspection, their conclusion was that they weren’t exactly sure how or why the basement flooded, but the were two drain pipes that were hooked up less than optimally and could have been causing water to collect around the foundation, but that was just process of elimination and they’d send the report to the adjuster and go from there – which could include a reutrn visit to look deeper (read: start ripping walls apart in the basement).

I already know the insurance adjuster doesn’t work on weekends, so I expect nothing before Monday. And since we’re holding off until then with the insurance, we figured we’d give the warranty people until Monday too.

So here we sit almost a full week after the flood with no answers and a basement that up to this point was the kids main hangout and also home to the pinball machine, my podcast setup, all the books we own, my drums, the kids’ computer and toys and stuff like that (luckily we didn’t get around to putting a TV or real furniture down there yet) is now a cold, damp, stinky area with exposed concrete and tack strip with everything piled in the bathroom down there because it was the only place that remained remotely dry (the rest is just piled up here on the first floor) that is mostly unusable and a disappointment.

The walls are damp and staing to get wavy and soft in spots. All of the doors show water damage and have warped to the point that they won’t close correctly. The carpet is long gone. The cement is still damp. The smell of wet still lingers.

Here’s to hearing something good from someone on Monday because if we’re left to repair all of this on our own, it’s going to be a while. And it sure would suck to pay for a whole house and then only be able to use 2/3rds of it.