Garden of Thought

Sure been a busy year thus far and here we are only getting going! House repairs are continuing as I have new carpet coming in this week (the last bit of the damage from last years flooding) - it's meant a lot of furniture moving on my part but it will be SO nice to have it done as it will essentially complete that level of the house. I've started looking at real estate listings in the area we are targeting to move to just to get a feel for what is out there.

I got to dance again for a friend's church for New Years services which was grand fun, and now I'm signed up to dance at an event in April as well. I was once told that if you can just start dancing onstage it won't seem so fearsome and I think I'm getting there. It's still kind of nerve-wracking but at least I'm not legitimately terrified anymore.

I've just finished up my official time at my church, all I have left is handing off the library things to a lady taking it on (so weird to give up my rubber stamp with the church library info on it), singing up front one more time and throwing my peacock-themed 'farewell' party in a couple of weeks. I'm pulling out all the stops for the party, it's a ton of work but I'm loving it, wish I could invite my online ladies to come if y'all were just closer.

Went to reassemble the bed in our guest room after my son and I wrestled it back into the house from the garage, just one of those basic metal frames. No bolts. Son: "It was wired together, Dad had me cut it apart with my wire cutters when we moved it."

I go fish around in the garage and locate four bolts about the right size. Assemble bed. It doesn't fit the boxspring. What the heck? It's a king sized frame? No wonder it was wired together. Go to Habitat for Humanity to drop off king frame and pick up a nicer queen one for only ten bucks. Yay! While there I notice 2 lovely green chairs and a small table to go with them. Chalkboard sign says chairs are 50% off today. Hm.

Go home and assemble bed, turn around and go back to Habitat. Now I have a new dining set! The chairs were only $12 and the table $14. Gosh I love that place! Woo!

Some inventions are brilliant things.  Rented a big dehumidifier from Home Depot and it's whirring away down in my damp basement now - most of the store around here were OUT of them, but I was able to get the next-to-last one at the next town over, obviously lots of people dealing with this right now.

En route I noted the rivers are really swollen, some right up to the bottoms of the bridges going over them.  Wow!  I think it's been 20 years since it was like this.

Apparently a huge snow melt immediately followed by large quantities of endless rain was too much for my basement - got up early yesterday to find all the carpets going squishy and water seeping from parts of the walls in the laundry room. 0.o  Ran a marathon until bedtime of "put down towels - spin other towels dry in washer - pull up wet towels and replace with spun ones - rinse and repeat".  Thank God my sump pump and washing machine kept up.  At one point my son said "Did you just pat the sump pump on the head?" "Yes, yes I did.  He's a Good Boy."

Water seepage included my library, we were scrambling to put all the lower level books into plastic bags because that's all we could do at that point, I was like the Little Dutch Boy with the finger in the dyke between towels and the wet-vac and couldn't stop.  Today we've spent all day packing and moving things upstairs because we'll have to pull up the carpet, it's horrible... BUT I only lost ONE book, a big timeline book with history fold-outs, it was too big to be on a regular shelf and by the time we found it there was no saving it.

What a job. Ugh. On the good side, this is the only time we've had this happen in the entire time we've lived here.