STORMS CONTINUED!!!!!

Yesterday's storm? Nothing compared to today's storm. They say Valpo got three inches yesterday. The problem, it kept raining. Not only raining, but dropping buckets and buckets of water.

When we started to leave for church this morning, we decided to go through the utility room so as not to get soaked in the rain. There was a small trickle of water coming under the garage door. We put some old towels down and went to church. Surely it couldn't be any worse than a trickle, right? WRONG!

Morning Worship Service at FEBC went as planned. When the song leader got up to lead the last song, one of the men came up to him and talked to him for about two minutes. Then the song leader said, "I will tell you about that later, let's sing hymn #43." So, we sang the hymn. Then the song leader said, "Refreshment time is canceled, Sunday School is canceled, the meeting with the young people is meeting at Megan Huber's house (as Megan was playing the piano, she just looked stunned) and the church gym has a huge sewage backup all over the floor."

Now you have to understand that Tim was preaching in Hammond, about 45 minutes away (remember we have only one car). So, Tim dropped us off at FEBC and headed to Hammond to preach. Then I thought - "What do we do, we haven't got a car and Tim won't be here for 2 hours." So, we went to Megan's house. Good for Megan that we did - we helped her clean up the house for the 30 or so people that were coming over. Poor Megan!

After Tim preached in Hammond,he drove to Megan's house. We fed him and then he said we better go home because we don't know what we are up against. So, the pictures will tell you what we found when we got home.

This is the utility room floor right off the garage. It looked like clean water, but it smelled funny.

So, we followed the smell to find this! This is the downstairs bathtub filled with eight inches of sewage back up.

The carpets didn't even look wet, so we walked out of the utility room and the carpets went squish. After getting the boxes, books and DVD's off the floor, this is what Betsey's room looked like.

Just another shot, for fun!?!?!?!



Another shot of the backyard. The water was up to the back of the shed. It went three backyards wide (Hastings, ours and Hobgoods).

The side yard between Hobgoods and us.

As you can see from the pictures, our backyard is now a swimming pool. The side yard isn't much better. Portage schools are all closed tomorrow. Tim closed PCS for tomorrow. But, our lovely children will still attend school (we will just move it to the dining room table upstairs - that is one negative of homeschooling in our children's minds).

Tomorrow we start the clean up. We are too tired to finish anymore tonight. Zachary's friend's Dad called to ask if we needed any help. How nice of him. We had most of the necessary work done and we were too tired to keep going, so we told him thanks, but no thanks. We will start again tomorrow.

Stay dry - we sure are going to try!