I eventually pumped the water out of the basement using a pool pump and the 150w outlet in the backseat of my Jeep. And when it got down low enough, my wife and I lied down in the muck on the floor of my basement to light my hot water heater manually. (It's natural gas, but the igniter for the pilot is electric.)
We are both exhausted having carried much of the basement contents out into the back yard to dry, and much of the dry stuff to the curb to be carted away. (you know... one day) A dry box of books weighs about 50lbs, a wet box, about 60lbs, and a wet box of old baby clothes about 150 lbs. We had a lot of old baby clothes. I'll follow up with some photos of the sequoia sized tree that snapped in two to cause all this trouble, but not today. The only way to connect is by using a laptop with Blackberry tether, so the connection is too slow for such antics.
They tell us it will be another 5 days before we get power, so you can imagine how happy I am with the Generac family of companies. But at least we have our useless local government calling us every couple of hours to tell us which websites to go to to get emergency information. If there is a do not call list for our local government you can damned well bet we're getting on it before this is over.
Anyway, got to go. We discovered a 1/2 case of old wine we had forgotten about and we need to use it up before I go crazy and set fire to the local town hall. It's only about a 4 mile hike each way... and I'll bet I can carry the gasoline that far....
5 comments:
Oh, man...
:-(
You are welcome to use my house to charge phones, Ipads, etc., and if you need an extra set of hands for anything, please don't hesitate to ask. (provided you'd solicit help from a random blog reader of course).
We happened to get very lucky with the storm (branches down and minimal water in basement), as much of our town (Rum) and surrounding areas are still without power, as you relayed.
Hang in Tom. Perhaps as you let go of these items you were attached to, you may begin to realizte that objects are not the source of happiness. Think about how clean your basement will be when this "creative destruction" is over.
Sorry that you have had to deal with such problems--no fun at all, and especially unfair when you had every reason to think you were set up to deal with the storm. Here's hoping that things will be getting better for you. A faithful reader.
Frithguild, for the record, I'm well aware that 'stuff' isnt' that important. I'm not upset about losing the stuff (in fact our monetary loss was minimal - less than $500) I'm really only upset that I have to devote 4 days (so far) and 20,000 calories to carrying it up and out of my house.
Even the cardboard boxes with a value of zero were heavy and bulky and covered in a combination of rainwater runoff and mouse droppings. Not the kind of stuff you'd want to deal with at the best of times, let alone with no power.
But we're getting ahead of it now... finally.
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