October 10, 2010

Sunday started with not only a conversation about ‘distilled water’ but coffee with ‘distilled water’, a fire for the chill and the brightly colored leaves waving to the rise of the morning sun. The trees are mostly golden in color, but very fall-like, none the less.

We quickly got back to our unfinished lengthy chore list of bagging garbage, pressure washing and another burning. When we opened a bag from last week, Carlo said the stink was “like gutting a deer.”

this pile once was...

on this pile - over 100 feet away!

There is no way we are even going to get to cleaning up the brush and logs. We are sore, exhausted, totally stressed and disgusted of all our losses; not to mention the miles of red tape we’ve been through since the flooding started. While Carlo sealed the swing, I took more pictures – What’s the point of this blog without pictures??? I don’t even want to think about losing the pretty tree. By 3:30 all our flood soaked losses were logged on paper and bagged. Now the claim process for personal losses can begin. These few days have caused me to sustain many mosquito bites, many sore muscles, many broken nails not to mention cuts and bruises…but it could have been worse! We could have been like this little critter who was obviously reaching for a safer space!

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By the standards of a 5'7" woman - me - here are the measurements of flood water headaches:

My calf - 17.66 feet - GET YOUR BOOTS LEVEL

My knee - 18.66 feet - EVACUATE LEVEL

My hip - 19.66 feet - YOU'LL NEED A BOAT LEVEL

My boobs - 20.66 feet - OCTOBER IS BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH LEVEL

My cheek - 21.66 feet - PANIC LEVEL

Top of my head - 22.00 feet - WE ARE SCREWED LEVEL / GOOD-BYE O'WICH LEVEL

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We walked the road looking for some of our stuff. We found fire wood – everywhere! We found our water can, milk crate, five buckets that were too deep in the woods to retrieve and we found our flower box! Obviously those same techniques in building the Ark were implemented in building this flower box. This flower box has now survived the 2008 Lake Delton flood and the September 24, 2010 flood. And the funny thing about finding it (both times) is that the dirt and flowers were still inside!

We had a short visit with Betty and Paul now that they’re back at home since the flood. They endured a lot of personal loss and are handling it remarkably well. As sad as it is about what they’ve lost, I am still so excited to have found our flower box – small in their spectrum, but large in mine! We went to LaTolteca and DQ – no mistake this time…just got a twist! We were back by 9:00 and by 10:00, Brothers and Sister was over and so was our day!