The Great Flood of March, 2013

Warning: the events described in this message may be disturbing to some readers. So disturbing that instead of providing you with pictures of what our basement looks like right now (the insurance agent has taken plenty of those), we are illustrating this post, as usual, with beautiful, recent pictures of ourselves (be sure to click the pictures to enlarge them):

NEWS FLASH: As we explained in our previous blog entry, it snowed a lot this winter! And we have been eager for the weather to improve.

So, we were excited to see the temperatures go up and up during the past week or so. It was warm out there in our pen all night long!

But we were not so happy as the piles of snow in our yard began turning into big, muddy pools of water.

We became downright unhappy when, overnight on Wednesday, March 13, it rained and rained and rained. Rained really hard. The ground in our pen got soaking wet.

Even worse:

As the night-time hours passed we realized (because we were awake and playing and running all over the house), something Pat did not yet know (because she was sound asleep upstairs): ground water was rising higher and higher into the basement, even in the places where Pat puts eight of our twelve litter boxes!

It wasn’t until Pat got up on Thursday morning and went downstairs to clean our litter boxes (always her first job of the day), that she saw we couldn’t get to the boxes without wading through an inch of water.

Then Pat got as upset as we already were!

Once again, lots of men came to the house, with noisy machines. These machines are supposed to drain all the water out of the basement and dry all the moisture out of the air.

Pat says this is just the first step: next week, all the laminate wood flooring will be pulled up, and new flooring will be installed.
 

Pat tries to comfort us by telling us that we are not the only ones to be flooded. According to the newspaper that magically appears in our mailbox every morning – the Charlottetown Guardian – homes all over the Island have been flooded. In many homes the water is much higher and the damage is much worse than in our house.

Meanwhile, so long as the machines are running in the basement, none of us are allowed to go down there. Pat says we must use the litter boxes upstairs and in the garage. And, she has put new litter boxes in the ground floor laundry room.

The biggest problem is that we have lost an entire floor and an entire staircase where we played our games all night long!

So, Pat has done the only thing she can think of to keep us entertained: she went out and bought us new toys, which you can see in these pictures. And for now we do much of our playing in the ground-floor family room.

The final straw:  The temperature has fallen once more and we just looked out the windows to see that it is SNOWING AGAIN!

 What a winter!