Did We Survive Hurricane Katrina or Not?

Argh. Another morning filled with threatening skies and way too much of the wet stuff. Ironically, I used to love the rain. I loved a good thunderstorm. I was a weather buff - I watched the Weather Channel for entertainment. I collected storm photos. Am I getting this across to you? A true weather nerd -- that was me. "Too much sunshine is horribly boring," I used to say. "Gotta have a hearty doomsday-looking thunderstorm every now and then just to liven things up." Yeeah okay... I think I've had all the livening up I can stand for a while, thanks.


After stressing out over how the boys would get to school in the rain, Dave appeared at the back door like a vision from heaven and informed us that about halfway to work this morning he realized that it was raining outside and that meant he had to take the boys to school. Good Dave. Boys off to school - babies still asleep.. I decided it would be a good time to tackle all the laundry I had been putting off over the weekend. I filled the washer to the brim with baby clothes, set the load size to 'extra large', waited for it to fill completely -- and that's when our washer heaved, sighed, and breathed its last.

I sent a brief email to Dave, mourning the loss of our washer:

"I have bad news. The washing machine has died."

Dave answered immediately:

"Oh no! Should we bury it in the backyard?"

Okay so we aren't actually going to bury it -- although I admit we did think about it much more seriously than we ever would have before Hurricane Katrina, I'm sure. But I do think that we should formally recognize the machine's three months of faithful service to our household. Thank you, washing machine, for removing all those mold stains from our curtains - for cleaning our mildewed socks, for saving countless drowned stuffed animals for the kids - for washing hundreds of pounds of mud and sludge out of so many of our things... Thank you for doing it all over again when we had to rid ourselves of sheetrock dust... I'm sorry that we killed you. You were a good washing machine. RIP.

(And thank you again to Tim Hughes for donating the washer and dryer to us in the first place.. We assure you we got a heck of a lot of use out of 'em.)

Shortly after the passing of one major appliance, a rental van showed up just outside with a big box for us. Our Kirby vacuum had arrived!

I was stunned to open the box and find a brand new vacuum cleaner... We had simply sent off to have our flooded one rebuilt as per the famous Kirby lifetime guarantee. But nope.. this wasn't rebuilt.. This was fresh and clean and brand new. After a couple minutes of total elation I found the packing slip. I can't really explain my reaction to a sane person -- so just in case you are sane and are reading this... bear with me. But you see -- there were just a few words in the 'comments' field on the packing slip from the rebuild plant:


This was the single funniest thing I had read in at least a decade. I laughed until I cried and then I started calling people and reading it to them. I think it has something to do with all the hoops we had to jump through just to get them to accept the silly vacuum cleaner for repair (you can find a brief account in this post). But then there's also the fact that for one brief moment someone up there in a factory in Ohio experienced just a tiny taste of what we were dealing with for months. 'What a mess', indeed.

No matter how much the weather and major appliances insisted that they would not cooperate -- the day went on and did so rather well, I must say. The phone rang so much it was hard to keep up. I suppose it had to happen to make up for all of those days of silence. Call after call - call during call... I really think now is a good time to perfect the art of using call waiting without hanging up on everybody.

We're waiting soooo patiently to be able to go out and deliver some stuff to people who need it. Smiles are such beautiful things. There should be a small supply of much-needed household items coming to us for distribution sometime tomorrow and we can hardly stand it. I'm sure there will be a story to tell -- and of course I'll bring my camera... More to come...