Sunday, September 14, 2008

The Day After

This morning when we awoke and looked out the window, this is what we saw. The rain had slowed over the night and all of the water drained off via the storm drainage system of our community. The Roman Aqueducts got nothing on our municipal drainage system!



Yesterday, an all time record was set for rainfall in the Chicago area, the rainiest day in Chicagoland history. We fared pretty well through all of it. Our crawl space took on water, but I was able to set up a pond pump with a garden hose, pumping the water out from time to time into our ejector sump pump basin (pretty proud of myself for that). Some of the basement carpet got a bit wet from foundation seepage, so we wet vacuumed it a bit and set some fans up to circulate the air. All in all, we are very lucky. A house two doors down got 5 inches of water in the basement. In many suburbs around the area, residents had to be evacuated by boat.



We spent most of yesterday in the house, mostly because the water was so high in the street we were afraid to drive in it. We spent yesterday evening making homemade marinara sauce and pesto sauce from the tomatoes and basil we grew in our garden. We made ourselves a nice dinner and drank a little wine to get through the flood.



Yes, compared to how others have fared with flooding in our area and in our country over this past weekend, we are very lucky indeed.






Saturday, September 13, 2008

I Always Wanted A House On A Lake.......





What would bring Colon Blow out of an over one year blog retirement to blog again? The Great Flood Of September 2008!








These pictures were taken outside of our home today. We have been living here since April of 1994 and have never seen our street flood like this before. Some of our neighbors that have been living here for a lot longer tell us that they have seen this happen before, but I get a different date, decade, etc., from each one of them as to when that was.








It has been raining for over 24 hours, and according to our neighbor Lois we have received over 8 inches of rain (she left her empty garbage can open, and measured it with a yardstick...good enough scientific methodology as far as I am concerned).









Good news is we have not lost power and are only experiencing some foundation seepage. Bad news is what is left of Hurricane Ike is headed our way tomorrow. Stay tuned for further developments!