Welcome 2010!

We're off to an auspicious start. Yesterday I kept smelling a very distinct smell. It was the smell at our house right after the tornado. It's a sweet smell - I think from wet wood. It's hard to explain and I have never smelled it after those first few days after our house was soaked inside and out.

So, yesterday I smelled it when I was in the dining room, but only thought about in passing a couple of times. Then, this morning I was in the kitchen and I heard a plop, plop, plop coming from the powder room. (For the guys in my family, that's a fancy name for the half bath.) There is nothing in the powder room that should be going plop, plop, plop. Of course, I go check on it. There is water on the floor around the potty. The potty leaked in there once before so it wasn't a total shock and there wasn't tons of water on the floor. I ran upstairs to get towels and tell Keith. We start getting it cleaned up and he decided he needed to go to the basement. I guess I wasn't home last time because I don't really remember the basement flooding before.

Ok, you know where this is going. You cannot imagine how much water can come from a toilet that is overflowing. One of my sons immediately fessed up that he noticed it was running yesterday, but thought it stopped. The thing had been overflowing since sometime yesterday afternoon. I'm guessing about 20 hours of water running.

Fortunately, the basement isn't finished yet and I do thank God for plastic bins. (FYI, never use storage bins with the split tops. They just hold water - those may go out with the damaged stuff.) Most of my Christmas decorations are in the good plastic bins and the preliminary assessment is that nothing priceless got wet.

Welcome 2010. I hope the rest of you is better that the beginning.