A Nicer Week

What a much nicer week this week than last…very uneventful, which makes for a nice change! We still have water in the basement, but there are dry spots and really the only standing water is in the shop and the back corners of the playroom. Most of the rest is still damp, but we are making progress. I have only done a couple of loads of laundry in the past week and a half, out of necessity, but I really need to get down there and do more. It is just not pleasant to be down there with everything being damp.

We babysat for Emma twice this week, once on Tuesday as normal and she is here again today. (She is napping right now.) We also had Braden both of those days and today we went and picked him up from preschool since his grandma and grandpa are going out of town.

Adam has had a very busy week this week. He is now taking two classes at Bethel, Written Communication II which is Monday evening and Psychology which is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Logan is taking the writing class too, but he is on his own in the other class. I guess it is good for him so he can get more used to going there on his own next year. Yes, I am pretty sure he is going to go to Bethel next year. He has been accepted and even has been offered a scholarship from Bethel, which he has a chance to increase if he attends a scholarship day at Bethel. We haven't actually turned in the acceptance letter and paid the fee yet, but that is definitely the way we are leaning. Adam also had a Nat's Honor Society meeting this week as well as a busy week with work. This week was the deadline for the 4-H scholarships, so that was kinda crazy trying to get those finished and turned in….then we forgot to sign them and he had to drop of new signature papers the next day.

Yesterday we had Joel L. here for a couple of hours while Julie had a dentist appt. and lunch date with Jay, and then last night I had worship team practice. Tonight after Braden gets picked up, we are going to meet the Hembrees for dinner at Rulli's to go over plans for tomorrow night and have our monthly meeting. Tomorrow evening we have WOL Parent's Game night. We will have a short parent meeting and then play games. Lori is making a giant Trouble game where the kids and parents will be the "markers". We are also going to play the brand new WOL Quiz Blitz…parents against kids. It ought to be a lot of fun.

Tomorrow morning we were supposed to go to church and do follow up for the Jesus Film Project. http://www.jesusfilm.org/ It is a great movie that was distributed in part by our church around our church neighborhood and tomorrow we were going to go out and ask if people had watched it and get feedback. Unfortunately, it is supposed to be well below 0 wind chill tomorrow and we are also under a lake effect snow advisory. Right now the sun is shining, but it is very cold! (Wind chill currently is 17, but is supposed to drop throughout the day.)

One month from this weekend, is our annual scrapbook retreat at Potato Creek and I am all ready very excited about it. Same ladies as always are going, but this year since the weekend we are going falls over President's Day, we are staying through Sunday night as well. I need to get busy and start pulling together page kits because as long as it takes me, I will need the whole month to get it done. I think what I may do is start working on some of Adam's baby photos and younger years' photos, so I will have some of them done for when his graduation open house comes around.

Flood!!!

(The following posts span a few days, and were things that I posted to Praisebooking, so the tenses and formats may not be quite right for my blog, but I want to get this up and don't have time to fix everything to have it in the right perspective, so I hope it makes sense!)

Thursday 1/3, we woke up to freezing weather, -2 and by mid morning is had warmed up to a whopping 8 degrees! The nice thing was, the sun was shining and with all the snow that we had it made for a bright and beautiful day.

After all of the snow and cold that we had in the last week, Sunday it got up to 51 degrees and the snow turned to mush! The Sr. High youth group were supposed to go to MI to go tubing, (Echo Valley), but they were closed because of the warm temps so they had to cancel.

By Tuesday it got up into the low 60s, we had severe thunderstorms Monday evening as well as a tornado watch. (And a week ago we were under nearly 2 foot of snow!) Now that all of that snow has melted, the Elkhart River, which is behind the homes across the street, is nearing flood stage. Our neighborhood is known for water, sometimes up into the streets, but more often in people's basements. Our sump pump has been running extra times today so I know the water is starting to come in, but when the basement gets really wet it simply seeps up through the floor so there is nothing that the pump can do to stop that. One good thing is that our home is higher up than most of the other homes in our neighborhood so we usually have some warning since the neighbors start pumping water out of their basements before we get wet.

Well, we got the water, much to my disappointment. The boys and I spend quite a bit of time Tues. morning/afternoon picking everything up off of the floor in the basement, and trust me that was no small task. UGH!! There was a small river flowing from Mark's shop through the laundry room into the sump pump, which was dragging saw dust with it. How pretty! The water is just flowing in and I have no idea how bad it might get, but even this is too much for me. Normally, when this happens we only get an inch or just a couple, so hopefully this time won't be any worse than before. We have been very lucky and this is the first time we have had any water in the basement for a couple of years.

(Thursday morning…..) Wow, what a night we had last night! Adam drives to Awana since he comes from work, so goes home a bit earlier than us. Just as we were leaving church, Lori, my best friend who lives across from the church comes out and says that Adam has been trying to call me on my cell phone and to call him right away. Uh oh...has our pump given out while we were away? Do we have 3 feet of water in our basement? We continue on our way home and my cell phone won't work. ARG! I can see that Adam is still trying to call and now Lori is trying to call too, but I can't get anything else on my phone. How frustrating and what a tense ride home, not knowing what was going on. Thankfully, we are only about 10 minutes from church. We finally get home and Adam says the Red Cross has called and the police and/or firemen are going to be around our neighborhood in about 45 minutes to evacuate everyone and then they will turn off our electricity!! What?? Why in the world would they do that? Don't they know that those of us that aren't completely flooded out need the electricity to keep our pumps running so we won't be totally flooded out?? How crazy is this? So I went into panic mode...moderate panic mode, I guess you could say. Mark and the boys started bringing up stuff from the basement, especially his woodworking equipment since he has a lot of money wrapped up in that. So far those things had just been up on tables, but if they are going to turn off our electricity, who knows how much water we might get. Meanwhile, I see the firemen pull up in front of our house and I go out to see what is going on. They don't really know much about the evacuation or the electricity; they say they are just there to rescue those in the back of our neighborhood who truly are stranded. All of the neighbors started coming out of their homes, everyone trying to figure out what was going on and what we were going to do. In the midst of all of this, Lori called to see what was going on and assured me that if we did have to be evacuated that we had a place to stay, as our church has two empty parsonages right now and she had talked to Pastor and he said that was no problem at all. At least that was one less worry. After that our evening turned into a waiting game. We watched 3-4 fire/rescue vehicles come into our neighborhood, including the rescue boat. The neighbors all congregated in another neighbor's yard and one sweet friend, (Leah), even went into make coffee for all of us!! It ended up that we didn't have to evacuate or have our electricity turned off, thank the Lord! They were only going to turn the electricity off in those homes where they had rescued the people that they knew were all ready flooded out and the electricity could cause a problem. About 10:30 everyone decided to go home and pray that our pumps all ran through the night and nothing else happened. Mark decided to take part of the day off from work today since he still had some personal days to take and is at Lowes right now to buy a new pump…just in case. Ours has held up so far, but it has run constantly for at least 36 hours and we are worried that it is going to die. Several other neighbors have had this problem and have gotten more water in their basements.

Flood Photos

Here are some photos of the flood. You can click on each photo to make them bigger.

Our wet basement. You can see all of our junk piled up to keep it dry.


The river across the street. Obviously the trees, picnic bench and lightpost, (in the 2nd photo), are not supposed to be in the water. Normally, they have 4-5 more feet of land after the light post before the river starts! This is Jared and Braden, (the little boy which we babysit.)


Our neighbor's car in his driveway. (This is just 3 houses down from us!)


This is a photo from the Holmes backyard shooting down the street...you sure can't see the street though since it is covered with water. That bush is about 5 feet tall.


Boat ride anyone?


The view down the street in front of the home where the boat is. See the mail box?


This is the end of our driveway by the later afternoon, Wednesday. Notice the car parked in the road...that is the car from one of the homes around the block, and the car in our driveway belongs to the Holmes, 2 doors down.


Our Wednesday night adventure.


The neighbors were all trying to figure out what was going on and what we were going to do.


The photo is a little blurry, but here you see Mark enjoy the coffee that Leah, (in the green jacket), made for all of us. This is in front of Mindy's home, who you can also see in the photo.

Happy New Year 2008

Wow, 2007 is gone all ready. The years just keep flying by faster and faster. Everyone always said that when I was young too, but I never believed it. I remember when the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas felt like it would never end. I even kept a countdown on my calendar, counting down those endless days until Christmas.

Now, 2008 is here and everyone is talking about New Year's Resolutions. Do I make any or just forget about it. It seems like it is very rare for a New Year's Resolution to actually take hold and get carried throughout the year. I could make the traditional resolutions to lose weight, exercise more, eat healthier, etc., but who am I kidding. I am not even going there. Even though I may not keep them, I am going to make some anyway, and here on my blog I am going to put them into writing. Okay, I know…that sounds really bad to all ready be saying that I won't keep them, but hey, I know myself and actually living by them and keeping them for a whole year just probably won't happen, but even if I can improve and do a bit better on those things that I am making my resolutions is better than nothing at all. So, with that said, here it goes:

My 2008 New Year's Resolutions

* To be happier every day and not take out bad things that happens on those around me.

* Work on having more of a quiet and gentle spirit. (This will be a tough one for me.)

* To go along with the one above… Be careful what comes out of my mouth. I really need to just learn to keep my mouth shut most of the time. Not everything that pops into my head needs to be said out loud.

* Be faithful in my quiet time. I have done great this WOL year doing my quiet time every day, but I want to make this something that I do all of the time and not just for WOL.

(edited 1/4 as i thought of a few more I wanted to add)

* Post to my blog more often. I did really well at the beginning of 2007, but then things started to fall apart during the summer. My goal is to post at least 4 times a month, but more than that would be even better.

* Keep the house cleaner, (which will make Mark happier!) I have been following the FlyLady plan for several years, but never very well. This year I want to try to do better by following her Daily Missions and my own personal Flight Plan.

http://www.flylady.net/pages/FlightPlan_Missions.asp

In the Scrapbook area:

* Scrapbook 90 Layouts. (Less than last year, but I really want to make my goal and I know trying for much more than this is definitely going to set myself up to fail.)

* Finish my ABC Scripture album.

* Continue working on my journaling.

* Continue working on showing more of my faith in my layouts.

We had a nice New Years Eve; we spent it at the Jordan's house, with the Springer, Chevaliers and the Burns. Springers didn't get there until late because they had a family thing with some of Brads relatives. Burns had to leave early because Tiffany wasn't feeling well. The Jordan's got the kids a Wii for Christmas and instead of spending the evening playing board games like we normally do we took turns playing the Wii. It was a lot of fun. We bowled and I played baseball with Veronica. I actually won in bowling…something I never would do in a real game, but in baseball Veronica won by the mercy rule…no, I wasn't doing very well. HA!

The days leading up to New Years Eve, weren't too great. I started coming down with a cold on Christmas Night and I have been fighting it all week. I am on the back side of it now, but it still isn't quite gone. We had Jean's funeral last Thursday and that same morning my hard drive crashed on my new laptop. Oh, was I mad!!! I spent an hour on the phone with Dell tech support and they determined that it needed to my replaced. They said that I wouldn't have the new drive until today, but unbelievably it came the next day. I am back up and running on my laptop now, but am still waiting to see if any of the data can be recovered from my old drive. Mark Kerk is looking at it and is going to try to get as much of the data off of it as he can. One of these days I am going to learn to keep everything backed up so I don't lose things. Thankfully, right before Christmas I backed up all of my photos, so I didn't lose any of those this time, but there are other files I really hope to get back.

Back to New Year's Eve….they were calling for snow, but not a lot. Adam came right from work so we had two cars there. About 7:00 it started snowing and did not let up all night. By the time we left at around 1AM, it had snowed between 6-8 inches and Adam didn't want to drive home so I drove the van and mark drive Adam's car. I really didn't want to drive, but I followed Mark and it was okay. It snowed like crazy all night and most of the day New Years Day and by now we have close to 2 feet of snow!!!

Here are a couple of photos that were taken on New Year's morning.

New Year's Day we took down the big Christmas tree even though I wanted to leave it up for a few more days. Oh well, at least all of my snowmen are still up and that helps it from being so dreary. We watched the Rose Bowl parade in the morning and in the evening I watched the HGTV Dream Home show. It is an incredible home that they built in the Florida Keys. You can enter a drawing to win the home, wouldn't that be awesome??? http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/dream_home_2008/text/0,,HGTV_30596_65296,00.html

Tonight Jared is spending the night with Turner Hanson and so it is a little on the quiet side around here right now. We are having chili for dinner and I think it is almost ready so I guess I better go and get the rest of the things ready for the meal.