"THE FLOOD"

Today's word is: l'eau (pronounced low) it means water. At a restaurant you might hear someone asking for "une carafe d'eau, s'il vous plait" (a carafe of water, please). Odd are these people are Americans who are used to having the waiter or waitress automatically bring them a glass of water and to keep it coming. This is one thing I find very strange about Europe, I don't think they drink as much (and I mean regular liquid, not alcohol you lushes) as Americans...but, that's just the impression I get. Maybe I'm just a weirdo how chugs down more liquid than the average person! But, I digress. I am not here to tell you about drinking water in a restaurant. I am here to reveal the exciting events that unfurled in our apartment yesterday.

The morning of December 10, 2007 day live on in the memories of the Mosslins family as the day we started our battle with Mother Nature - and poor drainage. Ok, to be fair it started last week when I awoke to find a puddle in the corner of our kitchen. It wasn't too large, but enough to make me worry and contact our landlords. We also needed them to call a plumber because our stupid toilet has been running non-stop for days (what a pain to shut off the water and turn it back on every time you use it!) Our landlord thought perhaps the kitchen leak was due to a pipe in the wall. I, secretly, thought he was an idiot. It's been raining for days with very few intervals of dryness, the walls weren't wet only the floor, and this side of the kitchen is below ground! Obviously, the water was leaking in from outside. Regardless, he said he'd find someone to check it and I had to be satisfied with that. That is, until we awoke Monday morning to find the ENTIRE apartment underwater! The water had come into the kitchen, ignoring our feeble towel barricade it ran down into the living room, into the entrance hall, and was creeping into the craft room/guest bedroom! What a disaster.
We, of course, had to clean it all up, contact our landlords again, and make a list of damage for the insurance company. Luckily, the carpet is the only thing that suffered any damage - all of our furniture has legs so they were kept up out of l'inondation (the flood).
Unfortunately, before we could really get to work on the clean up we had to figure out a way to contain the incoming water in the kitchen. So, off to Botanic, the local garden store, we went in search of sand. I had to make use of my excellent (ha, ha) French skills and I'm proud to say I managed to make the woman at Botanic understand and be sympathetic to our plight. Thankfully, they had two small bags of sand left. Apologetically, she explained that sand is an item for l’été (the summer) pas l'hiver (not the winter) so they didn't have any more in stock. But, two bags ended up being just fine for our purposes. Once we returned to our drenched home I began the mopping up process and Josh began the sandbagging process. Oh, we also bough an extra mop to double team the damned (or dammed) water.

Look at the sheer delight and joy at mopping which is plastered all over my face! This picture was actually taken late Sunday night when we entered into a small skirmish in the kitchen. We thought we had won the day, but oh how wrong we were.

Here is Josh on Monday morning employing our useful weapon, the towel, to soak up the pools of rain water. We bought an extra mop after Josh's hands became so red and raw from wringing out sopping wet towels that his hands looked as though they belonged to a little old washer woman. All day as we mopped and soaked up the water we kept peeking out the windows with the query, "has it stopped raining?" the answer was always, "NO". After about 3 hours the house was fairly dry. The ruined carpet was outdoors (probably getting even more wet though we did try to put it under the cover of the overhang) and we were able to bring some of our furniture back into the living room. We erected our sandbag dam in the kitchen doorway figuring if it were to flood again it would be best to contain it in the kitchen. We had already removed the kitchen chairs and we had placed little plastic booties on each of the table legs (and by booties I mean empty ice cream containers we've washed out and use as tupperware!).





Some of you might be curious as to what Ally did all day whilst we were in the midst of battling that acursed Mother Nature and her minions of rain...Ally was extremely helpful, let me tell you. I think this picture explains it all:
Yep, that's our little princess. She spent the day hopping from couch to dry towels trying not to get her precious paws wet! Can you believe that this is the same dog that happily and purposefully, splashes through every singled puddle on our morning walks? Go figure.

And an update for those interested on Friday I actually managed to finish covering one couch cushion. Here is a rather bad picture of the results. Not too shabby if I do say so myself. It is pretty time consuming sewing all this by hand, but in some ways it's pretty fun too. Today, I'm hoping to get the next one finished. Wish me luck and keep your fingers crossed the rain stops soon. It can't rain forever, can it?