Ok, saturday was seriously the weirdest, craziest, most insane day in my life, EVER.
To preface all of this, the past several weeks at work, including this last one, have been insanely busy, as in I’ve been staying an hour late (sometimes more) and getting home completely exhausted. Some nights we don’t even get to go home, because we’ve been slammed with wedding vendor meetings.
Well, we do go home after that, it’s just really late.
On top of that, last weekend Chase didn’t even get off work – he had to work both days, because of their yearly inventory,
So my point is, the weekends are my one and only time to not only relax, but to get personal stuff done – like christmas shopping. Well by wednesday, unfortunately, our Saturday was pretty much booked solid.
Now in order to keep this a LITTLE easier to read I will break each part of the day into sections, and also toss in some pictures that really don’t have anything to do with anything, it just helps to have pictures to break up the wall of text.
1. The morning
We are also house-sitting this weekend. This was actually helpful, because we were a little closer to the city than we are from my house, so we didn’t have to get up *too* early Saturday – but still we were up at 7:30, because I INSISTED on going to Waffle House before our cake testing appointment. Chase was kind enough to indulge me. I just really wanted waffles.
(This is my fiance, Chase. He is not eating waffles here.)
Well we leave and it’s raining. Like, with no let-up. Just pouring. And it’s freaking cold. Luckily we do have an umbrella. We get to waffle house and luckily, there’s a booth open and we have a nice, quick breakfast.
Then we were off to Collierville for our cake testing. We gave ourselves an hour because that’s usually what it takes – imagine, we live in the upper east corner of the city, and Collierville is in the absolute lower east. So it usually takes a while. Well it didn’t this time. We were somehow down there in 15 minutes. I don’t know if it was just being closer from my aunt and uncle’s house or WHAT… but we were way too early so we went to the Barnes and Noble down there for a few minutes, then back to our cake testing place.
I’m not going to dwell too much on the cake testing except to say – the woman was lovely, super nice, she loved our idea for the cake, she helped chase come up with a really cute idea for the groom’s cake, and then, she was really freaking expensive.
(This is not Chase’s groom cake, but it is an R2D2 cake, so it’s cool.)
So we left her house in the pouring rain, and I pulled out our directions down to Mississippi, for our family function.
2. Mid-day and when the story gets sad
So to just come right out and say it: my Aunt Shirley has cancer. She didn’t think she was going to be able to have her annual christmas lunch for all of us, but my grandmother swung into action and got everybody gathered up, pretty late in the week, got some food, and got everybody there.
We got there a little late, everybody was already eating… we joined in, and then once that was over we all sat around the living room and opened our presents from Uncle Bill & Aunt Shirley and watched them open our presents from all of us.
(Unfortunately I do not have a picture of Aunt Shirley on my flickr account, but I do have this picture of one of her shelves in her kitchen from christmas a few years ago.)
So once the presents were opened and done with – I got my annual package of various nice bath soap that I love and a card with money in it. Everyone was breaking up into little groups talking and starting to drift into the kitchen to clean up, when Aunt Shirley came over and knelt on the floor in front of me and Chase, and asked me what the colours of our wedding was going to be. I told her, and she started crying. She doesn’t know if she’s going to make it to the New Year, much less our wedding in April. Then she told me, “I want you to have mom’s china, I think she would want you to have it!” I didn’t register for china as I didn’t think it was needed; but I can’t even begin to tell you how honoured I am she wanted to give that to me. It’s my great-grandmother’s. It’s really beautiful, it’s got a delicate pattern of light blue and silver around the edges. She told us to come down one day and we could pack it up.
We left not long after, and I was ball of emotions. It’s a sad situation and I don’t like talking about sad situations here, but it was part of the crazy day so I felt like I needed to include it. It was sad but I’m glad we were able to go and spend the day with her.
(Edit: To bring the story a little bit of happy… Aunt Shirley was able to come to my wedding!)
3. Afternoon, and shopping.
From Mississippi we came back up to our neck of the woods and did some Christmas shopping – not much, because the wolfchase area was *packed.* We went to Guitar Center and got dad his present from Chase and I, and my cousin a gift card.
(This is my dad, he is a guitar.)
And then we hopped over to the mall, which was SO crowded… we had to park a million miles away and it was freaking freezing out. Luckily the rain had stopped, at least.
For all the parking trouble and long walk and dealing with crowds, we only needed to go one place, Victoria’s Secret, for Chase to get his sister this perfume she wanted for Christmas. It was so packed out in that store, you couldn’t move without bumping into someone or something. We were in line (and we were in line for like 20 minutes, too, it was soooo slow), when suddenly from the back corner of the room came this HUUUUUGE crash and the sound of 100s of bottles of perfume and lotion crashing to the floor and spilling and I guess breaking in some cases. Every single person in the store went dead quiet and looked in the direction, then went “Oooooo!”
LOL.
Then we went home, I had a snack and read, then went and laid down because I was exhausted.
My aunt nana had been planning a game night Saturday night all week. When I talked to her and Kristie at Aunt Shirley’s that morning, they weren’t sure if it was going to happen, because outside of me, I don’t think they had really mentioned it to anybody, so nothing had been planned.
(Aunt Nana gives cousin Cath what can only be described as a “look.”)
Kristie called me that afternoon and said we were on to do something – either go to a movie or play games and get takeout at home. She texted me while I was laying down, said come over around 6:30, it’s game night. Cath, Rach and their friend Ashley were also coming over, and I texted our own Ash to come over, too.
4. SWEET MERCIFUL CRAP
So Chase, Ash and I get there around the same time, and us, Kristie and Nana are just vegging around in their living room, watching SNL, and being entertained by Nana re-enacting parts of her girls’ basketball game that afternoon (she coaches). They have gotten their house decorated so nice – just last week Kristie was telling me how hard they’ve worked to get that house looking like they wanted – and they’ve got all the Christmas stuff up, the tree was on, there were wrapped presents everywhere, plus it smelled nice because they had some candles lit, and the fireplace going. It was all very cozy. We got Macaroni Grill for dinner, Kristie called it in, and since Cath, Rach and Ashley (from here on out, referred to as Ashley #2) were still on their way, they agreed to go by and pick it up.
(And for reference, here is Kristie and Ash in Paris, which is not where we were last night.)
I go out to the fridge in the garage to make sure they’ve got a coke for me, and I came back and put the coke in the inside fridge. As I shut the door, Kristie comes barreling through the kitchen, yelling at the top of lungs, “GET SOME TOWELS!!!!!!!”
I have no clue what’s going on. I went in the laundry room and grabbed a couple of towels out of a laundry basket, and followed the sounds of people to the upstairs.
Upstairs, I went into Kristie’s room, and then look into her connected bathroom – and see water, pouring out of the vent in the ceiling.
Like someone had just laid a hose right about it and turned it on. This was no drip, this was GUSHING. I threw the towels on the floor and ran to find more…
And when I get downstairs, I saw what was going on in the living room. Water was POURING out of the light fixture in the center of the living room. It was also coming out of the vent right next to the Christmas tree. It was drenching everything. Ash and I ran into the kitchen and found pots and pants to put under them, and I found a bucket in the garage, and eventually dumped some Christmas stuff out a storage tub in the dining room and used that for the biggest “drip.”
Meanwhile, Kristie and Chase were running around trying to get the water turned OFF. Nana was apparently up in the attic at the source of the problem (the hot water heater!) – and as she told us later, was for some reason trying to “block” the water by jumping in front of it, LOL.
I realised things are getting wet in the living room. I started grabbing things – especially photos and artwork, and taking them into the “safe” room, the dining room, after that I grabbed knick-knacks and the presents and books, and anything else, Ash jumped in and helped, and then we started moving what furniture we could, we moved the chairs and the ottoman and a table. Then we realised, our buckets are started to overflow. I don’t know what difference it made at that point, because the rug is DRENCHED… but Ash and I started running them out the front door and emptying them on the front porch, and I used one of the smaller ones to try to get the water level down in the tub, since we couldn’t lift that.
(Ash magically appears in a burst of light behind Nana and Kristie.)
I had had my boots off when this all happened. After a few moments of running around, my socks were drenched, so I abandoned them. I was running around bare-foot most of the night, including running outside to dump the water. I was drenched – the light fixture had apparently collected quite a bit of water which all got DUMPED on my head at one point, so my head was wet, my sweatshirt was soaked, and my pants from the knees down were completely wet. Fun times!
Now I really don’t know what happened when. All of a sudden Cath, Rach and Ashley #2 appeared, and had no clue what was going on, but I think they realised once they got in the house. They threw the food down and jumped in, moving stuff, bailing out water, etc.
Ok so – the water heater had burst, or how-ever you phrase that. Kristie tried to cut the water, but the shut-off valve was broken on the heater. There was no stopping the deluge. So one good thing – all that water? At least it was warm and not freezing cold.
Kristie’s neighbor and his son noticed the hub-bub and came over – man, do they get neighbor of the year award or WHAT – Nana and Kristie didn’t even know him, they came over and pitched right in with moving stuff and trying to towel up water.
And apparently the water had run through the alarm system, setting off their house alarm and… guess what, within minutes, the fire department was there. HALLELUJAH – because they shut the water off at the street. And at last, the water stopped pouring out of the attic. It had collected between the levels, however, so it was still coming down, but it was at least stopped.
They also killed the power to the house, as they said, “we don’t want fire on top of water!” We scrambled for flashlights, and of course with the power out, no more heat.
The next visitor to the party was the plumber, I believe it was. He came into the room where Nana, cath and Rach and I were standing, after he had looked upstairs. He said, “You’re going to need a new hot water heater.” I don’t know if we embarrassed him or what, because all of us burst out laughing at that. Like, NO WAY! LMAO
Next up – Kristie’s sister, her husband, their two kids, and Kristie’s mom all appeared. Sam, Kristie’s nephew, jumped right in as well, he grabbed a mop and started on the leak that had started in the kitchen.
I had called my parents begging for towels. We were completely out – throwing all those towels under the deluge had apparently been the wrong idea, because now all our towels were soaked, and it hadn’t done ANYTHING to stop the water spreading. So my parents and Ash’s parents came over with towels, and once they had dropped those off I told them to go on and go, because by that point, the Memphis Light Gas and Water guys had showed up, and the house was getting very crowded.
Cath and I went upstairs and started trying to dry – the water upstairs had gone from Kristie’s bathroom into her bedroom, and was also coming out of a vent in the ceiling in the hallway, and from there it had spread into the guestroom. We had already gotten all of Kristie’s knick-knacks and sentimental things out of the room , along with her rug, now we set about moving everything else and trying to dry the floor off.
(Cath runs through the darkness.)
The firefighters seriously went above and beyond – they could have just left, but they said, it’s below freezing tonight – we need to help them move this stuff. They came in and helped move all the heavy furniture in the living room out, including the giant rug, which was completely soaked and took everybody to move it out. The girls, Sam and I formed a line and started moving what we could upstairs, out of the way.
Finally, there wasn’t anything else we could do. Kristie had called ServPro and they were going to be there around 10:30 to assess the damage and start drying things out. We found our dinners, and somehow, after 2 and a half hours, they were still warm! We sat down in the dining room, with a couple of the candles, and ate. Just as we did, The Light Gas and Water guys managed to get the lights back on in half the house (the dry part.) YAY!
We all sat around and calmed down, now most everyone had left and we were just waiting on ServPro. I went in Nana’s room and sat in front of her space heater, trying to dry my jeans. She told me she had checked my wedding dress – I had COMPLETELY forgotten it was there!!!!! Luckily it was stored in one of the dry rooms – and funnily enough, Kristie said that when she put it there, she had thought, the hot water heater isn’t anywhere near here! LOL (they had had it do this once before, but that shut-off valve had worked, so it had only come out of one spot in Kristie’s bathroom.)
So ServPro got there, and amazingly they said the ceiling in the living room didn’t look like it would collapse. We had all been staying out of there because you could see the water above, and the ceiling was actually starting to come apart in the center. The ServPro guys said it looked like they should be able to dry it and patch it.
The bad news, all the floor upstairs would have to be replaced. They said that sort of floor has some sort of moisture barrier, so there was no way to get the water out, and it would cause the floor to start buckling – plus, it would start to mold.
Thank goodness for insurance, eh?
We were exhausted. Once ServPro started pulling their giant fans out, we went on home – since we were just around the corner at my other aunt and uncle’s house, we could come back if they needed. We all ached and hurt all over for days afterwards.
To sum it up, water sucks, it really really sucks
(Ash and Chase, with water during happier times with water.)
We were supposed to get snow last night, but we didn’t. Thankfully. It’s still freaking freezing out.
I am just SO SO thankful we did NOT go to a movie last night. The entire house would have been flooded. On top of that – it’s not as if we’re over there every night. Thank God we were all there and able to help when it happened, if it had just been Nana and Kristie there, well let’s just not think about it.
So that’s that. I don’t have a proper ending.
The End.