If you don't like reading posts with lots of whining, you should skip this one. Seriously.
The last few weeks have been overwhelming. First, our air conditioner flooded so we had to get the carpet replaced in our hallway. (Why yes, we already had to get the
carpet replaced in our hallway a year ago because of an earlier bathroom flood.) BUT, the carpet guy said he couldn't match our carpet color, so he was going to take the carpet out of our office/guest room to patch the hall and then replace the whole room of carpet in the office in a different color. So we had to move everything out of our office and pile it haphazardly into the living room because there was no other place for it.
Of course, then we realized we were going to have to
turn that room into a nursery, so it's been coming back together
slowly as we Craig's List furniture that is no longer going to work in the space and generally rethink, reorganize, and rearrange everything.
Last weekend, we escaped the chaos at home to go camping and tubing. We planned the trip before Hurricane Irene was on the radar, but since we had already paid for everything, there was no way we were not going to go. Long story short, the trip was aborted after only one night.
Long story long, the first night, I hardly slept at all. I was freezing cold, we had noisy neighbors, I was in pain from accidentally shoving a piece of wood under my fingernail, and I had a migraine. The next morning we drove to out of the mountains to go tubing, which was a complete nightmare. The water was freezing, it started pouring down rain and the wind was pushing us back upstream. The "lazy river" became a "swim for survival" exercise. I said to Chuk more than once, "We're going to die out here!" I may have been melodramatic, but it was torture.
Finally, we finished. We drove back to our camp only to discover that while we had been out all day the storm had destroyed our camp. Most catastrophically, our rain shelter had been pulled out of the ground by the wind and was bent and irreparably broken and our lantern had blown over and was broken into little pieces. So, in the pouring rain with sunset approaching, we found ourselves with no shelter and no light. I made the snap decision we were leaving right now!
We shoved everything we could salvage back into the car even though all of our supplies were soaking wet and drove through much of the night in thick fog and heavy rain back home. We had only been gone about 36 hours, but we had been through so much, it felt like eternity. We were exhausted and hungry, but at least we were in our safe, dry, warm home.
Except scratch that about safe, dry and warm. All of our windows had leaked in the hurricane and water was seeping through the walls too. Our apartment was flooded...AGAIN...except like ten times worse this time. The next morning Chuk rented a carpet shampoo-er to suck the water out of the carpet. He got more than four gallons out of our bedroom alone. Then he shampoo-ed all the carpets. We thought we were good, until we woke up the next morning and the carpets were wet again.
Sigh. My husband works full time in the day and goes to grad school full time at night. I'm still in my first trimester and sleeping like a narcoleptic with mono. There is so much to do, yet Chuk doesn't have the time to do it and I don't have the energy. So it sits. Our apartment smells like mildew and looks like chaos. Our basement is flung with wet, muddy camping equipment; I'm sure our neighbors all hate us now.
I try to breathe deeply and reassure myself it'll get done eventually, but in the meantime, all I do is nap.
