October 14, 2010

Got up to the pitch black morning at 6:00. I had coffee and talked to Carlo and for a half an hour. By 7:15, Chad the pressure washer guy was at the door.

He said no problems other than the crawl space not having a floor drain. Hope he figures this one out! By 10:15 Chad was gone and the cleaning - by his standards - was done...I am, however, anal!

the door looks good!

By 2:00 there were no returned calls or carpenter arrival. WTF? I spent most of the day at the laptop; doing work stuff and blogging. At 3:15 I found out the carpenter was not coming and no one was coming back to finish cleaning up the crawl space until Monday...so I cleaned up some things Chad and his power washer must have missed. I wiped down the inside of the shed walls and dried the floor. I was kept company by an unwanted visitor that was the size of my big toe - but that mouse could have been the size of an elephant for how "eeked" out I was. I got everything back in the shed and hosed off my boots for the umpteenth time. Steve stopped by and visited for a couple of hours. I packed up my stuff so I can hit the road when the sun rises in the morning. Friday will be a short day at home with lots to do since I am leaving for Springfield on Saturday. Carlo will be O'Wiching his weekend away - hopefully everyone will show up like they're suppose to!

October 13, 2010

I left work at 6:00, got coffee and didn’t stop again until I reached the oasis. I got gas and kept going straight to Schultz’s for the tractor part, which wasn’t in – but Steve will be dropping it off on his way home from work. Since Todd called and said they had to come after lunch...I stopped at the Hair Lair for a quick cut from Stephanie. I picked up some stuff from Wal-Mart and got to the cabin around 11:30. Serv Pro showed up about an hour later – Claudia worked on cleaning the contents of the shed and Jake pulled out all the insulation.

I am so glad I didn’t have to do all of that. They were wrapping things up at 3:00 and then I took a quick trip down by Betty and Paul. It was a gorgeous day.

Paul was sleeping from his procedure recovery and I was back within an hour. I started a fire, napped and got up to go to bed and by 7:30 or so, the dream fairies were sprinkling their dream dust!

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!

***

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

***

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!

October 11, 2010

What a busy bunch of days we had. Today is tetanus shot day and time to head home for work; tow for me and back on Wednesday and five for Carlo and back on Saturday. It worked out great that we were both able to get up here…me to take care of all the P.R. work and legality issues – Carlo to fix the tractor and both of us to start tackling the clean up. If we could clone ourselves or had a couple of extras, we most likely would have gotten everything done. Now it will have to wait until we can get here together sometime at the end of November and just hope there’s no snow! All of what needs to be done is two-person lifting and moving chores. We are happy to have the cleaning crew coming on Wednesday and the insulation crew on Thursday. Big jobs off our list that we needed done and weren’t looking forward to doing (again!)

October 9, 2010

Saturday was a C-R-A-Z-Y day that started with breakfast, a trip to Wal-Mart and then back to the cabin for lots and lots of cleaning. We cleaned out the flower beds, power washed the swing, the sidewalk, the patio furniture, the outside steps, the concrete slab and we removed all the damaged items from the shed.

before

after

our important cleaning tools

We were getting ready to take a trip into town to pick up some more parts and supplies, when we locked ourselves out of the cabin. We knew there was nothing we could do at the moment, so we ran our errands and decided to deal with the locked up cabin when we returned. Luckily, Carlo had an extra ignition key in the unlocked truck.

***

The conversation went something like this:

Her: “Are you ready to go?”

Him: “Yes, do you have your wallet?

Her: “Yes.” (door shutting)

Him: “Keys?”

Her: “Funny.”

Him: “I’m not kidding.”

Her: “Not funny.”

Him: “No, I really don’t have them.”

Her: (agitated) “Stop effin’ kidding around."

Him: “I’m not, I’m serious."

Her: (laughing)

Him: (yelling) “Just get in the truck; we’ll deal with it later!”

***
We stopped at the florist where I picked up a piece of art I had seen earlier in the morning when we went to breakfast. We stopped and bought more parts for the tractor – that took two stops. We even stopped for DQ. I wanted the Peanut Butter Parfait and got the Peanut Buster Parfait. Not happy about the “T” being an “S”. Very disappointing! When we got back to the cabin we found that the place was pretty secure and difficult to break in to! It took quite a bit of time for Carlo to get us in and we were surprised that of all things to be correctly installed in this cabin – it would be the doors! Of course, I cannot tell you how Carlo managed to gain entry – because if I did, I’d have to kill you!

We finished sprucing up, setting out pumpkins, gourds and bird seed.

hoping to lure some critters back

through all the craziness...it was a beautiful day!

Carlo got back to the tractor and got it running, although the key doesn’t work due to the damage caused by the flood and the water rotting all the wires. He ordered the part and of course replaced many of the other parts. So, it runs, although we don’t know if it actually works!

We met another neighbor couple, Pete and Monica, who stopped by to say ‘hi’ as they drove by. After visiting with them for a bit, we showered and left dinner. We ate a great meal at The Cove. We were hungry since we worked off our breakfast! Since my cute little iphone isn’t a GPS, we had a lot of trouble locating the restaurant but found it after calling since we turned back and forth so many times. By 8:15, we were beyond exhausted. Some Tylenol and our pillows and our 15 hour busy, productive, stress filled day had come to an end!

October 8, 2010

On Friday, a bunch of debris was moved to the fire pit from under the porch and we also raked a lot a leaves and branches away from the house. I walked down to the river and found many logs and fallen tree trunks had moved. The benches spun around and our only pretty tree is hanging on to the shore by a thread – or a root – or just by chance. Looks like we’ve lost a good three feet or more of shore. Looks like that pretty tree won’t last much longer.

Carlo was anxious to work on the tractor. He ran for parts – worked on the tractor some more and still no luck…and we still can’t believe it’s not covered and we just bought it August 31, 2010…ergh!

We didn’t see any animals other than three filthy squirrels and a huge flock of some unknown species of bird that appeared to be black in color and about 150+ in quantity. They weren’t vultures or crows but they were somewhat scary, loud and flew so tightly together that they looked like a swift and low moving cloud – they might have been starlings. I think I’ll Google that!

Google: This video is a larger scaled replica of what happened at O'Wich - enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE

We found many crazy bug like things - a striped hair spider; I set him on fire! And there was a lizard-like something under the porch; soon to be a fossil...plus lots and lots of flies and of course, the never dying mosquitoes!

Friday night, we sat in the quiet, cool air as we looked through the golden hued leaves and watched the sun kiss the tree, by the river, as it set. We started a huge fire outside and as darkness covered us overhead, we found ourselves under the most fantastic star filled sky. What a welcomed "ahhh" moment...it is hard to believe that 48" of water was wrapped around our nirvana.

October 7, 2010

What a busy, unplanned, weekend…met with the insurance adjuster, Kim, who advised what is covered, how to file the supplemental paperwork and how to log our losses. Our original agent went out of business and never added Carlo to the flood policy, which was a headache in itself. I needed to sign the claim papers, but had our agent not dropped the ball…Carlo could have handled it! I guess it could have been worse!
Also met with the Serv Pro representative, Todd, who assured me everything will get cleaned, inside and out, on the 13th and 14th. The carpenter will be re-insulating and taping the crawl space on the 14th and recovering the water pipes. Luckily, Todd and Kim were able to chat about the fees involved – and we were very lucky that this process is covered at 100%! The water tank and pump are covered at a depreciated value and we’re waiting to hear what is covered for the thousands of dollars of loss of Carlo’s tools that were in the shed. We found out the tractor wasn’t covered because it wasn’t in the shed or under the house…ya think?
The plumber also stopped by to repair some pipes, add some valves and made sure we would have water until the pump and tank can be ordered, delivered and installed at the end of the month. Glad we have a running account with this vendor – just add it to the bill!

My boots are a great indicator of the soft ground that our property is on...a devastating reminder of all the mess around us.