30 days out.

Today marks the one-month anniversary of our "homelessness." Yay. I figured I'd use this opportunity to fill in some of the gaps between that first day and today.

Like I mentioned here, that first day was craziness, we ended up staying at a friend's house and I went to work that night. That kicked off a few solid days of almost no sleep. Although The Princess (our dog) had a blast at my friend's house, he also caused a few problems... including an opportunity for one of my friend's dogs to escape! He did return quickly (apparently he does that often!), but still, I was quite stressed since I was there by myself at the time. The Hubby had gone to help move some of his parents' stuff to higher ground in case the water reached their house, my friend was working, and her fiance was running around helping friends/family members and checking out the damage. So at some point The Hubby returned, said "We borrowed a boat. I'm going to rescue the kitties. I'll be back," and then he left again. I was speechless, and thrilled. He took them and The Princess to stay with some of his family until we could get settled. The bad news was that he had to "dock" the boat on our front porch, as the water was pretty deep and was about 6 inches deep in our house in some spots, and about a foot deep in the laundry room (which is ground level). But they were able to get some more of our stuff out of the house, and the kitties were now safe and secure. Meanwhile, rather than sleeping after a full night of work, I was moving the few belongings we had at that point into a hotel room, where we would be staying for the next three nights. Hotels are usually creepy, but the door to our room appeared to have been broken down at some point. It wouldn't lock right. After that, we transferred to a different hotel, which was way worse than that one. We only had to stay there one night, since the next day The In-Laws decided that their house was safe from floodwaters and they were going to move back in there. Still, this led to a few more sleepless "nights" (days, really, since I was still going to work every night) due to dogs barking and my nephew crying (his default setting, it seems) whenever The Sister-In-Law was over or dropped him off with her parents. And that's pretty much where we are now.

My phone has never been as busy as it was the first couple of weeks after our house flooded. Between concerned calls from family and friends, trying to get things figured out, and hearing about the rumor mill working over time in our town, I was seriously doing some networking. Information was gold. There was a town meeting (which was crap), rumors of riots (crap), drunken idiots from my town crammed into one hotel (the police were called at one point), and all kinds of people either complaining or doing what needed to be done. Most of the loudest complainers were the ones who were the least affected. It made me hate my town even more than I already did, hearing people complain about a little water in their yard, or in their crawl space under their house, and getting pissed that they weren't going to get the same amount of money as people who had water almost up to their windows. I quickly adopted the attitude regarding my own situation of "It's just stuff, we're okay, and hell, we wanted to move anyway!" At the same time, however, I feel so badly for those who aren't as lucky as we are. But I am still dreading the idea of having to completely furnish a new house. *shudder*  The Hubby sticks firmly to the idea of bean bag chairs, but he elaborated by saying they'll be all black. We'll call the look "Flood Chic."