Hurricane Angus
Every year, long before the storm season begins, the National Weather Service selects names for the coming tropical storms and hurricanes. They are always the names of people and names are never repeated.
In response to the past four days, I decided I need to make my own list of names in order to properly label our family storms. The first storms of the season will be Angus, Betsy, Chevre, and Deb-orah. Is it wishful thinking that I'll only need four this year? I'll probably need to come up with the rest at a later date.
Angus made landfall as a Category 2 Hurricane around 6pm on Friday June 1st.
The boys and I arrived at the Olympia house to find that our next door neighbor's house was just put on the market and our house was surface-cleaned but in desperate need of deep cleaning in the bathrooms and kitchen.
I started to panic when I saw the realtor sign in the neighbor's yard. Two houses for sale right next door to each other is probably not going to be good for one of us. I had been keeping an eye on houses for sale in our neighborhood for two years now, this one somehow slipped by and caught me off guard.
Since I expected that I would need to do some cleaning, I wasn't thrown off my game at the sight of the fridge and toilets. I started assigning the kids jobs and equipping them with specific instructions and I set off to tackle whatever spilled in the fridge and was never cleaned out.
As we were starting our tasks the hurricane force winds kicked up and trouble began. The light-bulb saga was in full swing. When Matt checked out the house at the end of April he noticed that the place was really dark. About half of the lights in the house were burned out. Aware of this in advance I was able to purchase a bunch of nice bright LED bulbs for the house. As soon as Gabe climbed up the ladder and unscrewed the first fixture I knew we were in deep trouble. The entire house was outfitted with twist and lock bulbs not the standard screw in bulbs. Somehow we didn't change any of these bulbs the entire time we lived in the house, so I was unaware that none of the bulbs I purchased would work. Twist and lock bulbs are $7-$8 each. I have 44 bulbs in the house. IF we would be lucky enough to find twist and lock bulbs it was going to cost over $300 to replace them all. That is a lot of money in bulbs.
Knee deep in fridge gunk, a lack of bulbs, money flying out the window and one of my kids not doing as good of a job as I hoped, I received news that the people driving four hours to come down and help me were just in a car accident.
We worked until midnight that first night, I didn't sleep well, and we were back at it on Saturday. Slowly we chipped away at what seemed like a never ending list. Each time we knocked a few things off, we had to put a few more on. Each trip to a home improvement store was followed by another with returns and new purchases. Somehow, by 9:30 that night we pulled in to my favorite Oly Mexican food joint and sat down for dinner.
It seemed that the storm had passed.
Apparently, we were just in the part of the storm where everything calms down before all hell breaks loose again.
Sunday we had a few hours to relax then we were off to baseball for Eli's double-header and before you know it I was driving back down to Oly. I worked a little more that night and again went to bed way too late and slept not nearly well enough.
Monday the carpet cleaners came, I had lunch with a friend who is moving across the country and the home stagers arrived. And then it all hit me: exhaustion, stress and realization that this is it, we are actually getting rid of my beautiful, amazing awesome house and the chances of finding anything remotely as clean and shiny up here in the Seattle area is slim to none. I started to cry, I was frustrated, angry and sad. I finally got out of town and arrived back in Issaquah around 8pm. I walked in the house to find Gabe was just starting dinner and Matt was engaged in some serious conversation regarding one of the boys.
Without a moment to catch my breath, the figurative flood waters rose and all the storminess of the previous days seemed like nothing compared to this wave.
As if the house prep and listing wasn't stressful enough we now have kid drama to work through.
I'm praying that the rain is stopped and the waters are receding so can begin clean-up mode.
In response to the past four days, I decided I need to make my own list of names in order to properly label our family storms. The first storms of the season will be Angus, Betsy, Chevre, and Deb-orah. Is it wishful thinking that I'll only need four this year? I'll probably need to come up with the rest at a later date.
Angus made landfall as a Category 2 Hurricane around 6pm on Friday June 1st.
The boys and I arrived at the Olympia house to find that our next door neighbor's house was just put on the market and our house was surface-cleaned but in desperate need of deep cleaning in the bathrooms and kitchen.
I started to panic when I saw the realtor sign in the neighbor's yard. Two houses for sale right next door to each other is probably not going to be good for one of us. I had been keeping an eye on houses for sale in our neighborhood for two years now, this one somehow slipped by and caught me off guard.
Since I expected that I would need to do some cleaning, I wasn't thrown off my game at the sight of the fridge and toilets. I started assigning the kids jobs and equipping them with specific instructions and I set off to tackle whatever spilled in the fridge and was never cleaned out.
As we were starting our tasks the hurricane force winds kicked up and trouble began. The light-bulb saga was in full swing. When Matt checked out the house at the end of April he noticed that the place was really dark. About half of the lights in the house were burned out. Aware of this in advance I was able to purchase a bunch of nice bright LED bulbs for the house. As soon as Gabe climbed up the ladder and unscrewed the first fixture I knew we were in deep trouble. The entire house was outfitted with twist and lock bulbs not the standard screw in bulbs. Somehow we didn't change any of these bulbs the entire time we lived in the house, so I was unaware that none of the bulbs I purchased would work. Twist and lock bulbs are $7-$8 each. I have 44 bulbs in the house. IF we would be lucky enough to find twist and lock bulbs it was going to cost over $300 to replace them all. That is a lot of money in bulbs.
Knee deep in fridge gunk, a lack of bulbs, money flying out the window and one of my kids not doing as good of a job as I hoped, I received news that the people driving four hours to come down and help me were just in a car accident.
We worked until midnight that first night, I didn't sleep well, and we were back at it on Saturday. Slowly we chipped away at what seemed like a never ending list. Each time we knocked a few things off, we had to put a few more on. Each trip to a home improvement store was followed by another with returns and new purchases. Somehow, by 9:30 that night we pulled in to my favorite Oly Mexican food joint and sat down for dinner.
It seemed that the storm had passed.
Apparently, we were just in the part of the storm where everything calms down before all hell breaks loose again.
Sunday we had a few hours to relax then we were off to baseball for Eli's double-header and before you know it I was driving back down to Oly. I worked a little more that night and again went to bed way too late and slept not nearly well enough.
Monday the carpet cleaners came, I had lunch with a friend who is moving across the country and the home stagers arrived. And then it all hit me: exhaustion, stress and realization that this is it, we are actually getting rid of my beautiful, amazing awesome house and the chances of finding anything remotely as clean and shiny up here in the Seattle area is slim to none. I started to cry, I was frustrated, angry and sad. I finally got out of town and arrived back in Issaquah around 8pm. I walked in the house to find Gabe was just starting dinner and Matt was engaged in some serious conversation regarding one of the boys.
Without a moment to catch my breath, the figurative flood waters rose and all the storminess of the previous days seemed like nothing compared to this wave.
As if the house prep and listing wasn't stressful enough we now have kid drama to work through.
I'm praying that the rain is stopped and the waters are receding so can begin clean-up mode.
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