Every time it rains it rains...in my basement

                                                                                                                                         
  It has been an exhausting couple of weeks. I have The Neighbors From Hell and they have been living up to the name lately.I won't go into detail, but they are taking years off my life.In addition, it has rained every day for almost three weeks. Seriously. Every day. I was about to start building an ark and taking in two of everything (except Demon Neighbors.) After so much rain the ground decided it couldn't drink another drop and started storing it in my basement instead.
  Tuesday morning there was a little water on the basement floor in one room. It was nearly all gone by Tuesday night. Ivy, my thirteen year old, and I were going to get our baths and play some games and watch tv. Around 8:00 I was about to take my shower when I decided to check on the basement one more time. When I went down I screamed. There were two inches of water on the floor and water was pouring in the old chimney flue. I started grabbing things up, trying to save them from the rising water. I had everything up off the floor, which gets damp even at the best of times, but as the water rose it just wasn't high enough. I called Ivy down and we were rescuing everything we could. At some point Fuzzy, my 18 year old, came home and we were all schlepping stuff upstairs. The water was still rising and I was literally rescuing things just before they were engulfed by water. One example is a Victorian velvet and celluloid photo album, with photos, which I grabbed up just as the box filled with water. It survived untouched, luckily.

  Eventually the water was nearly up to my knees, which, ok, that's not that high, but it was high enough that entire tubs, with other tubs on top of them, (So you'd think the weight would hold them down.) were FLOATING.I know one of the kids showed me a box of wooden dollhouse furniture that was taken somewhere to be dried out later, and I have no idea where it went. I only hope it wasn't the box with the vintage wood dollhouse living room set with velvet cushions that my husband paid more than he should have for me at an auction recently.
  The next day we were clearing out some of the wet things we hadn't saved or noticed the night before, and Fuzz found a Pedigree Aunt Sally from Worzel Gummidge, soaking wet, under some things in the back corner of the basement. By now she has been totally dried out and survived her ordeal unscathed.

 

                                             Aunt Sally is relieved that it's all over.
  Ken grew up watching Worzel Gummidge in England and passed his love of it on to Ivy, who owns the whole series on DVD, so it's nice to have Aunt Sally around.
   This array of international ladies all got wet to varying degrees, with Miss India fairing the worst. All are dry now and don't seem to have suffered any lasting damage.

 

  On top of everything else, the pilot light was washed out on the water heater and couldn't be relit. We managed on what was in the tank at 1:00 in the morning when we were finished and the water had started to recede. Ken spent most of the next day drying out the pilot with a hair drier and trying to relight it. It was just too soaked though, so Ken and I took icy showers, while Ivy resorted to a bathtub filled by pans of water heated on the stove. Yesterday a fan on the pilot most of the day finally got it dried out enough that it let itself be relit and we had hot water once again.
  We were able to save almost everything, and what we couldn't save from getting wet we have mostly been able to dry out by now. I suppose we were pretty lucky. I had recently cleared up the basement and had already rescued my father's box of photographs and had gotten things up off the floor, or it would have been much worse. And we were lucky of course that it was only a slight basement flood, and we didn't lose our whole house, which has happened to alot of people all over the world lately. Our town was built on a swamp, so just living here is asking for it anyway. Nature keeps trying to revert it back to a swamp. It hasn't rained for a couple of days now, so maybe the ground will have a chance to dry out and go back to being absorbent again!