So last night Jen and I head for bed around 11:00. We notice the sky flashing with lightning and hear a few low rumbles of thunder. As we were watching "King of the Hill" and drifting off to sleep we notice the lightning get brighter and more often and the thunder getting louder. The boys have slept through thunderstorms before so I wasn't that concerned that it would bother them, but then a few lightning strikes came real close to the house and the thunder was pretty loud.....It first started with Andrew waking up crying, darn, but I looked in at William and he was sawing logs, cool. So we decided we might as well take Andrew into our bedroom since the chance of getting him back down to sleep would be pretty slim until the storm passed. Just our luck a few rumbles later William wakes up crying and screaming, sh**. So we are all sitting on our bed watching the local TV doing stories on the storm and keeping the boys entertained. We got hit pretty hard with rain and wind. The umbrella on the back deck blew out of the table so I ran downstairs and stuck my nose outside just far enough to collapse the umbrella so it wouldn't fly away and got soaked. After watching Letterman and the beginning of Ferguson at 1:00am I decide that the storm has pretty much passed and the thunder wasn't as loud. I put William to bed relatively easy and he falls asleep after 5 or 10 minutes. Andrew is another story. Jen has to deal with him and he is AWAKE and wired for some reason so he immediately goes into full bore crying and screaming (which William stays asleep for thank God). So Jen is in Andrews room trying to calm him down and I hear the sump pump in the basement running and running and running. I decide that I better go down and check it out since I don't really trust that sump pump. (the damn thing ran during the drought conditions of last week for some reason). As I hit the basement floor off the stairs I feel -squish- (Son of a B****) and then I get to the door of the furnace room and -squish- (F***). I open the door to see sump pit overflowing with about 1/4 inch of water in the furnace room. Thank God the sump was working, but there was too much water coming too fast for it to handle it. For what I can see most of the water is contained in this room with a few spots in the carpet getting wet and along the walls of the furnace room. I quickly start pulling things out of the room. Lucky for me there wasn't anything in the room in cardboard except the box for the battery backup that I have yet to install. (just became a priority). Good thing that I didn't get around to my project of putting a bunch of stuff under the stairs like I was planning. After getting all of the stuff to the dry area of the basement I start taking buckets of water from the sump pit upstairs and dumping it in the shower drain. I am not sure I was doing any good, but I didn't know what else to do. It seemed that after an hour the water level in the pit was getting lower. I notice more flashes of lightning and go upstairs to see if I can find a radar on the TV. Nope. I guess they check-out at midnight at the local stations. Lucky for me the second storm never hit. About 2:30 the sump was able to catch up to the water coming in and I felt safe enough to go upstairs to bed. I layed there until after 3:00 listening for it to go on and then turn off since I was still paranoid, but exhaustion got the better part of me and I fell asleep. Waking up at 7:00 was fun this morning, but I made it. Now just the sound of fans downstairs trying to dry up the carpet. Overall I would have been really FUBAR'd if the sump went totally out and nothing got damaged so I was petty fortunate.
Friday - I got to play in a golf outing at Gray Goose in Decatur with my boss from work, all expenses paid whooo hoooo!! It was a beautiful day outside. How did I play? uhhh yeah....It was a beautiful day outside. Man I played like total crap. Even though it's a Florida scramble and I don't play that often I count on contributing to the score more often, or at least give the team a few options. Two years ago when I played in this outing I was the designated driver since I could get off the tee box pretty good. I had more flubbed shots then I have ever had in my life. I had a number of really nice shots, but the flubs won. I think I was trying too hard, but when I had a few beers at the turn I started to calm down a little bit and not really care. We ended up tying for 3rd place in our flight with a 63 and I brought home a few giveaways for the kids to play with. Overall it was better than working for the day. Friday night I was thinking of running out to the store to get the new Harry Potter book for Jen at midnight, but I chose sleep instead. That and she wouldn't be able to start reading until she got home from work Sat. afternoon.
Saturday - The usual 8:00am wake up with the boys. We all just hung out at the house. For our Anniversary I bought Jen a Jack Skellington Picture that was pretty cool and hung it over the bed. It actually looks pretty good there and we might leave it. Jen got home at 1:00 and went into immediate "Harry Potter" mode where she was on the couch reading her book and oblivious to everyone and everything. I took William for his haircut at 3:00. Overall he did pretty good, but started crying and fidgeting halfway through. When we got home we packed up the boys and all their stuff and went to Grandma's house. This is our first experiment of letting the boys spend the night with grandma. Jen and I left the kids at grandma's (I don't think they even cared that we left). Then the big question was "what do we do without kids?". It was our Anniversary, but we hadn't really planned anything. Options were Cinema grille to see harry potter, just go and see harry potter, or do a nice dinner. We finally ended up going to Triangle Park for a nice dinner. After a nice dinner it was 8:00pm and again it was "what next?" There was no reason to go home since we didn't have to put kids to bed and I didn't feel like going home yet. I knew that Jen wanted to get back to her book so that was also a consideration. I decided that we should drop in on the Cramers for a surprise visit and wouldn't you know it they weren't home. Neither was Tracy. Crap. So I finally lamented and we went home. Man we are getting to be old fuddy duddies. Jen went into "Harry Potter" mode and I worked on cleaning up the basement from the flood a couple of days ago.
Sunday - Without children crawling all over me, I had the chance to sleep in, but not the ability. I can only lay down for so long before my back starts to hurt. I woke up at 8:00 but was able to sleep on and off for another hour. Jen got ready for work and I got ready to pick up the kids. My father-in-law calls me about working on the water heater. A little bonus from the basement flood is that I noticed that everything else had dried up besides the area around the water heater. Then I noticed water leaking from the heater. Son of a B****. So after picking the kids up at grandma's (it went relatively well) I took the kids over to the other Grandma's for the day so Tom and I could work on water heater replacement. First stop was Lowes to pick up the water heater and some supplies. Second stop was to Menards (for more supplies) after getting the heater home and seeing that we will have to adjust the gas/water pipes to get it to work since this new heater isn't exactly like the 16 year old one in the basement (go figure). After all this running around it's already 5:00pm and we figure that we better not start now since we still would have hours of work to do, so we decide to put everything back to the way it was (thank God we didn't tear out the old one like I wanted to do early on).....The third stop was to Menards again for more supplies since we broke a valve that allows water into the water heater. Hopefully the heater will hold out until next weekend. So back to the in-laws to pick up the car and head back home to try and air the house out to get the smell of stinky carpet out of the house. We put the kids to bed and Jen went back to "Harry" mode. She finished the book a little after midnight.
