When it rains

I'm torn. I want to keep telling fun stories from MI, but there is so much going on right here right now, it seems wrong to not talk about it.

Michigan story number 2 was going to be about going to my Aunt's farm. It's basically organic and they sell everything at the farmer's market. It was beautiful, from a story book. Rolling fields that blurred into woods both of which were back drops to trellised herb gardens next to the rows of different berries. Lunch was served next to the green houses on big long tables next to wood clad barns and out buildings. It was stunning.

Michigan Story number 3 was going to explain how we ended up laughing so hard my mom did an honest "spit take" trying to drink her water as the sole surviving stylish chicken suffering from post traumatic stress disorder was dive bombing the window next to my sister's dining room table. How my sister went from raising some chickens to raising chicken, why Kristen and I sang taps in chicken speak, and why basting kittens feet with butter seemed ironic. I laughed so hard I got woozy.

But no, it's time to chat about our little uneventful weekend... It started off with firetrucks and ambulances and only got more interesting from there.

On Friday we went up to Salt Lake to visit with Greydon's Aunt Angela and to have a day at the pool. It was great, he loves swimming and even was kicking in the water doing a good impersonation of a swimmer. We called it a day and drove home.

As we are unloading the car I am hearing this repetitive beeping sound. It was four loud electronic beeps, pause repeat, pause repeat. Eventually we figured out it was actually coming from our house and was an alarm. When we opened up the door we could hear that the beep pause repeat beep pause repeat was accompanied by the phrase, "Warning, carbon monoxide", pause repeat. We had already learned that the smoke detectors were shockingly sensitive and that waving dishtowels underneath the one in the kitchen could be effective. So I go in and start waving whatever is at hand under whatever sensor is near, moving through the house keeping my eye open for some sort of flashing arrow pointing to whatever was causing our carbon monoxide levels to rise so threateningly, to no avail.

Meanwhile Kristen finds the non-emergent phone number for the local fire department. They advise her to exit the premise immediately and call 911. She does, and insists that I do the same. Greydon is still sleeping in the car. I realize I haven't finished my expedition for flashing arrows so while she isn't looking I sneak back in the house wave underneath a few more detectors and check the basement... no arrows. By now she is on the phone with 911, who dispatches the fire department we called originally, 911 also insists the house should remain vacated and start asking about our well being, headaches, sick to our stomachs, etc.

Let's just say Kristen encouraged an end to my interior expedition and we waited outside our beeping home.

We go wait outside, a firetruck eventually pulls up with three fire fighters, then an ambulance with two more. The nicest guys in the world. They go into the house with sensors galore and check out the whole place and can't find a trace of any kind of gas. They pull off one detector at time and narrow it down to the detector that is at the top of our vaulted ceiling. Nope, I don't have a ladder.. just a step stool.

They grab a ladder from the truck and a few hold the ladder in the middle of the room while another climbs it precariously, checks out the detector... basically no idea why it is going off at all. They reset the system, and encourage us to change our batteries just in case. Great guys by the way. They thought it was cool Greydon, who was awake by now, was wearing his fireman t-shirt. They take off.

We go about our evening, eat, put Greydon down, watch TV, and then BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, warning Carbon monoxide. Of course every detector is going off ,Kristen goes to comfort Greydon while I pull off a few detectors with no results... and I know it has to be up in the vault again. I haven't purchased a ladder in the last hour so I grab the step stool and a broom handle and just can reach to reset the detector by pushing the button with the broom handle. First resetting it means that all of the piercing alarms go off, and then it cycles through, then it is silent and happy.

Until 15 minutes later... again, balance on stool, poke with broom, loud beeping and ringing... all good... until 15 minutes later... again, balance on stool, poke with broom, loud beeping and ringing...until 15 minutes later... again, balance on stool, poke with broom, loud beeping and ringing...until 15 minutes later... again, balance on stool, poke with broom, loud beeping and ringing......

I think it happened three to four times at various intervals. I knew I was going to have to get to that vault. So I get two dining room chairs and set them face to face, stack the step stool on top of those and scale the pile a la Wile E. Coyote mastermind, and take down the detector. I reset it and set it on the kitchen table... and five minutes later it starts all over again beeping and warning... I gut the detector of it's battery and it dies much to my pleasure. Of course now I get to play the "what if game" What if the over sensitive detector is right and the firemen are wrong? I have to go stand next to Greydon for a while and open his window before I can feel good about things. By now he was sleeping through the beeps bells and whistles. But the gutting works and the rest of the night passes without incident.

That was Friday. Saturday is a special day, so I know I want to keep getting the house more and more done. I start in the unfinished basement. Much got put down there and we've been using it as a staging area to sort and unpack. I get all of the Christmas decorations put under the stairs, continue to line up the empty luggage along one of the walls, put boxes and cartons of this category here and another category over there, all of the baby stuff that was too cool to give away over here, collapse down a bunch of boxes over there, make huge headway. Kristen has been working also of course, it's naptime so she goes to go lay down with Greydon, I get a bite to eat.... and head into the garage.

When we moved in the garage is where every question mark got put. There are garagey things mixed with luggage mixed with craft supplies, next to decor, next to "why did we keep that", next to who knows what. I dig in. We've already done a lot out there so it isn't long before I have gotten a ton done. I put most of it away in the basement in the appropriate area, or put things away now that we know where "away" is. By the time I'm too pooped to continue there is only stuff on either wall, I felt awesome. Kristen and Greydon come down from nap time, we eat, Kristen likes what she sees and eventually goes back upstairs, and then it starts raining.

It is cute, but when I was teaching Greydon what "rain" means I carried him out into it (not this time) and we put our hands out and caught the drops. This time he goes to the doors to the patio and keeps putting his hand out like he was going to catch the rain through the glass. Cute! It kept raining.. it was crazy, it started hailing, it rained so much I couldn't even see the back yard. It was amazing and cool and a little scary. Greydon kept saying "Wow" while we watched it.

Before too long it was already over and I saw that one of our patio chairs had blown over and was floating in the muddy back yard... then saw that the storm had even been strong enough to blow over our relatively heavy gas grill that was now laying on it's side half drowning in mud. I asked Kristen to get some shoes on to go help me get it standing right side up, she did, we do, and then we see it... and things all go to hell.

As we round the side of the house near where the grill was laying the first thing that catches my eye is that the air conditioner is not sitting level like it is supposed to. The concrete pad it sits on is falling into where our side yard used to be which is now a gaping hole, and as I follow the logical sight line I see the window well, but no basement window. This is a new house, so the basement windows are large 5 foot windows, and all that is there is nothing a big whole that used to be a window. Kristen turns around and runs inside and down to the basement, I grab a pile of towels on my way and I hear her crying as I am half way down the stairs. The stairs lead down to the opposite side of the basement away from the missing window, it's the other side of the house, and even this far from the missing window I can see muddy water that is half way up to the first step. I splash in and see that the entire basement is floating in ankle deep muddy water. I get over to where the window is supposed to be and Kristen is trying to stop the water fall that is still coming in with whatever she can find... my pile of towels is laughable and worthless.

To be honest I'm getting a little emotional even writing this down. It was such a kick to the gut, we had no idea what to even try to do next. I start grabbing anything made out of cardboard and put it on top of something made out of plastic. Kristen started looking for someone to call. I call our builder contact/realtor and a few random numbers looking for a sump pump that sounds like something I will eventually need and continue to stack boxes or pull out boxes too big to stack. I get a little wave of nausea as I start pulling out the biggest box. I know what is in there. We have a large clothing box full of clothing items that you just don't get rid of, and I know her wedding dress is in there. The bottom is disintegrating as I drag it up the stairs and into the garage where it wilts and sags to the left.

Our realtor shows up making frantic phone calls and immediately starts helping me pull out the most obvious things to save first.. half of which were safely in the garage just earlier that morning. I find out that Kristen's wedding dress was high enough on the hanger that only the storage bag got water in it, the dress itself seems fine. The same is certainly not true as I tote my 2002 Olympic bag out to the garage with water just streaming out of the bottom of it. I know my original uniform is soaked and anything paper is dead. I remember at that point starting to shut down, I didn't know which way to even turn. The water was still more than 4 inches deep, the basement was still full of soaking storage.

Someone came to our door. Apparently we were not the only house to have problems. The rain came so fast that we later found out 14 houses had some sort of flooding, almost all through flooded window wells. Our was listed later as the worse. Looking outside we figured out that not only was there too much water too fast, but the backfill around our foundation failed. When you build a home, you dig a huge hole, pour the foundation and basement, and then fill in around the foundation. Apparently that dirt wasn't compacted correctly, collapsed underneath the air conditioner, part of the patio, and along the side of the house. Then, all of that dirt and water went into our well blowing out the window. The window landed half way across the basement and shattered. The insulation around the inside of the window was even ripped from the wall.

The man who came the door was the local bishop. There were crews helping out where they could, finishing at one house and moving on to the other. Because ours ended up to be the worse, it needed the most work and took the longest. Eventually I think we had thirty people show up in less than an hour. They asked me what to do and I said let's empty it out. SO bucket brigades formed and they started taking out everything and anything.. ironically putting it all in the recently emptied garage. People brought in about five different shop vacs, would dump the water from the vac into buckets that were then passed through the windows, dumped, and returned for more water. I'm not positive of the time elapsed, but I'm pretty sure it was less than two hours and everything was out and the floor was as dry as you can get it with a shop vac. It was amazing, then they all went down three doors to another house that had two inches in their whole basement. It really was a freakish flash storm. We were even on the news, well our house was.

The builders seem to be accepting all responsibility for everything and already have arranged for a restoration company that has been ripping out drywall and insulation. It is an unfinished basement, but there was drywall cladding the stair well. The floors are all caked with mud, which will get washed down tomorrow. A temporary window has been put in and sometime tomorrow we meet with the builders to figure out how to get everything to the shape it should be in.

We haven't even had a chance to go to our new ward before this weekend, and it didn't matter. Neighbors are neighbors, and they saved us. I can barely wrap my head around what is waiting for us in the garage now. It is full, left to right floor to ceiling. I get a little sick to my stomach. I've seen some of the ruined art, memorabilia, posters, pictures. I don't know yet if the high water marks on the wood bassinet or high chair will wash off. I grabbed the quilt rack my grandfather made for me and engraved as one of the first things, I don't know if there will be any lasting damage. They are "things". I know that, but memories and feelings are attached to things. Nothing we have is garbage or junk. We got rid of so many things before we moved that most of what we have here now, with a few exceptions, were things we liked, things with a story. And now I have a garage full of sodden stories. They are just things, we'll be fine... things.

And only a day ago I was concerned with an over zealous smoke detector. I feel small. I feel powerless. I think that's a good thing actually, we could all probably do with a little shrinking every now and then.

Tomorrow scares me a little. It's time to start sorting.