Totally Quiet On the Internet, But...

Not around the house! This has been one heckuva winter and spring for me. I hope I never have to go through anything like this again. We were hit with a basement flood and as always, called a professional to do the job right so there was no possibility of mold. I had just talked to my son-in-law about building my much-needed shelves under the basement stairs which housed much of my stash... the overflow of what didn't fit into my shelves and cabinets in my adjoining sewing room. We have done everything to this basement the experts have advised during the years of many floods, but of course, when neighbors across the street go digging in their yard to get to their weekening part of this pitiful drainage system repaired, it was left dug up and piled up because of continual downpours; therefore creating a dam that pushed the water right back to our sump pump(s), and it overworked our system, got hot, and tripped the breaker. It was in the middle of the night, and it had been so long since we'd had any trouble at all, we didn't have our generator ready to go. Truthfully, with the volume of water there was, there's no way that generator could have kept up.

Thank goodness not all my stash was vulnerable; much was in plastic, but much wasn't, and I was heart broken. I washed and soaked in Oxyclean (fabrics were already ruined so I had nothing to lose), ironed charts; tried to keep kits (you can't imagine) together as I had to rinse the flood water out of fabric and floss. I had to do so many at one time, it was hard to keep everything straight, and it was like an assembly line for days. I cried a lot, and there were older charts I'd bought on eBay that shredded in my hands as I dropped them in the barrel. I know these are only things, and I've suffered real tragedy, that besides losing my daughter, I don't even want to get into here. However, this was like rubbing the salt into the old scars and opening them up again. My stash is precious to me and I was leaving notes for my daughter about what to do with which stash for her to get as close to the value as she could.

A word of warning: the Floss-A-Way baggies are not waterproof, nor are the bottoms of the mesh zipper bags. In fact, nothing but deeper (depending on the height of the water) Rubbermaid, Sterlite, or other inexpensive thick plastic containers keep out the water.

In the meantime, we got through a Junior-Senior Prom, graduation, parties while trying to put things back together so we could live. I'm a very proud grandma of a beautiful, hard-working girl with high honors (many scholarships). I have pictures coming. It's a miracle I was able to find the camera.... I should have taken a pic of the downstairs before progress began. I'm still trying to put my stash back together in an organized fashion and be sure that it is completely safe.

Now we're looking for the perfect house without a basement. I know it's out there. I look around at this house we built and I designed 20 years ago, and with all the stuff in it, it's overwhelming. It's a comfortable house, but it's too big for us, and as we face the fact that we're seniors, and my lupus makes it difficult to get up and down the stairs, we have to scale down and toss, sell, donate (I've already done a bunch, but it's not even a dent), and have you ever tried to get rid of collections??? I cry every time I think about it. I've worked so hard, I have one hip killing me and my bad knee is worse. Now the bushes are beckoning and have gotten out of hand with all the rain we've had. I started yesterday, but this house has waaaay too many bushes; another thing we're looking for is a much smaller yard and not many bushes. Trees are fine, but this is a nursery's dream in my yard. I may sell those too if they'll dig 'em up.

Needless to say, the stitching department here is not productive, only working like the dickens to save what I can (and I keep finding more that I at first thought was safe... in the zipper bags), and it's sickening to see see things all wrinkled and dried, but readable, go into a plastic bin because of something I really would like to do before I die, hopefully not by drowning.... and snakes (ah... yes, with the water came little green garter snakes... OMG).

I'll try to get caught up with my Yahoo Groups, pix I've taken during this horrifying experience of my lovely granddaughter, and once I completely get everything put away, I'll be able to get stitching again. I've never worked so hard in my life!