Mayhem

So here's the semi-long version of what happened to us this weekend.

Thursday night the national weather service had a severe wind warning for the Seattle area. They were expecting gusts up to 65mph and record rain fall. Ryan and I got home around 10:30 after hanging out with friends in Ballard to sit at the kitchen table, chat for about 5 minutes and then BOOM the lights went out. We went to bed and heard all of these emergency vehicles go up and down our street to fix some issue. We didn't sleep that well - I kept thinking about the big trees in our backyard and the proximity to our house. Luckily nothing happened there.

We woke up, walked down the street and saw that a huge tree blocked Meridian and completely knocked out the power lines and cable. The weird part though - my mom had partial power. Her building has three power sources so she had lights in most rooms but no frig or furnace. We camped out at her place for a little while and visited with my brother, his wife and Coleman the incredible.

Saturday we decided to go climbing. But Friday night I remember falling asleep and waking up to some sort of rushing noise. Ryan thought it was just the forced air but I didn't think that would happen without the power. We left early that morning and ended up staying over at Ben and Danielle's that night. They had this air mattress that kept deflating throughout the night - but it had a pump on it so we could inflate when ever we realized our elbows were touching the floor.

Sunday we headed back to the house to feed Makiah and ran into our neighbor Jo. She was roughing it at home and using her fire stove. We were chatting for a while and Ryan went inside to feed the pooch, only to come back out and "uh, Jen? Our basement's flooded." Crap.

He put on my big green boots and then tromped downstairs to shut off the water line to the house. Basically our water heater failed and the bottom dropped out and the water line ended up running for 2 days. So when we discovered it, we had about 12" of standing water. Fun times.

Ryan's step dad is a plumber and he suggested getting the water out asap. We used our garden hoses to try getting the water to siffen out but by the time we got any water out, the basement had already gotten rid of all the water. Where it went, we don't know. Apparently our concrete slab has lots of cracks in it and it seeped through. I don't know if that's good or bad.

Meanwhile our power was still out. Thank goodness. All of Ryan's computer equipment was still plugged in and would have fried our circuits and could have potentially caused a fire. Now we're in full water damage mode and are on a huge waiting list with water damage experts to get it fixed. Our insurance company has been informed and we're waiting for an inspector to come out and assess the damage.

Crazy. Our property manager at the office had a tree fall on his house! Poor guy - things could definitely be worse.

Well back to the mayhem....