Lights Out

The wind during the past day or two has been incredible.

Around 6:30 PM, the power went out. I wasn't concerned, just lit a few candles and it looked so nice I started taking pictures.

For some reason it didn't occur to me to call the electric company and tell them our power was out. Luckily someone else must have.

Cyclamen

Sami came home around 8 and started to worry. He was afraid of being cold at night and searched everywhere for the inverter so he could power the pellet stove from the car battery.

He didn't find the inverter, but the power came back around 8:45 PM just when we were leaving the house.

Aaron's friend Veronica had a bunch of free tickets to Harvey's comedy club, so we saw a hypnotist make a group of volunteers do really stupid things. It was pretty funny, but not as good as the one we saw at University Towers.

Missing Geocache!

While we were in NC for the holidays, I received an email from some Portland geocachers. They had solved the puzzle to our first cache hide, Kielikurssi, but couldn't find the cache and told us it looked like the area had flooded in recent rains.

I stopped by the cache site to check on it and found the lower portion of the path completely underwater. It's very likely our cache has floated away, but we won't know until things dry up a bit. As I returned to the car, I saw this cool mushroom.

Sauna Project - Flood!

Friday evening Melissa and Erica came over to help remove some more drywall in the laundry room (to prep for plumbing work).

Yesterday Sami and I worked on installing the tile in the laundry room. We marked out the layout, cut the edge pieces and tiled the corner where the water heater will be moved...

We woke up to find our pretty tile job underwater... Don't know if we have to rip it up and start over, or if it will dry out ok.

Our bathroom and our home theater room flooded too.

Unfortunately, the carpeted home theater room was packed full of stuff since we're in the middle of several projects. We had to move everything upstairs.

After we cleared the whole basement out (and turned the rest of our house into a huge mess), we found this crack in the foundation wall under the stairs.

We're hoping it's the only one, but actually it seems like the water is coming from the joint between the foundation wall and the slab.

Unfortunately I think the only thing we can do right now is to buy a sump pump and get the water out of our crawl space so it won't keep flowing in.