The Flood

Every culture has a flood story. At least that's what I learned in my bible class at U of M in 1996. Our culture had ours yesterday.

All was fine and dandy yesterday morning as I put some laundry in, made a little fruit and yogurt and sat down to catch up with my college roommate and good friend on the phone. Somewhere after we had talked about boys, jobs, pregnancies and our other roommates, I realised that the corner of my rug was wet. Hmm. Could the cat have PEED on the rug? That would be really unlike her, but why else would it be wet? Actually that's way too much water to be cat pee. WAIT A MINUTE - OUR ENTIRE FLOOR IS COVERED IN A HALF INCH OF WATER!!!

The only way I noticed was that it brought chunks of cat hair/dirt from places like behind the refrigerator and bookshelves. If you walked, you literally splashed. It was not wet, it was flooded.

I quickly hung up the phone and woke Matt up. My brain didn't understand how we could actually get the water OUT of the apartment. We took all of our towels and tried to sop it up. We laid towels across the doorways (it was FLOWING out of the apartment into the hallway and also into our bathroom, through our bedroom (wood floor...oy). We picked up everything that was on the floor and tried to get as much as you can (in a 500 square foot apartment) out of the way. Then we remembered there was a drain under the sink. Unfortunately the floor is not shaped such that water would automatically flow to that drain - it seems to be a bit raised, which is maybe the dumbest part of our apartment that we didn't know - but we swept all the water that we could down that drain. We squeezed towels and laid them down again. We moved all of our furniture (even the fridge and washing machine! - that was Matt, I take no credit) and dried behind it. We turned on all air conditioners at full blast and our super powered fan at high speed, and we dried stuff. For two hours. This is not a fun activity for anyone. It was especially not fun on Saturday morning, pregnant. It's hard enough to bend over, but this was all on the floor. By the end I felt like a truck had hit me. Matt was a superstar. Now our apartment is in complete disarray, but things seem dry enough to put back in their spots today, and somehow, there is really no permanent damage. We're so super lucky. And - we don't have to sweep or mop this weekend.