good riddance time of your life

whew. whirlwind few days. its 8:33am bos time, although i might be in central time now... i'm on a flight heading from boston to salt lake city and then to sacramento - going to smf for the week for work. i'll be working out of the california office until friday when i head back to boston. the following thur i leave for europe for almost 2 weeks. crazy! i can't believe how quickly this summer has flown by.

yesterday was no exception. i had planned to have a laid-back day. on friday, after work, i went out with a coworker from our australian office. she is in town for two weeks and i figured she might want to have someone to have dinner with. we went to b&g oyster house and it was sooo gross and hot outside. we sat inside and i had a nice seared tuna (no oysters for me) and some wine. i think my bread was moldy. anyway, we were out kind of late - 11 or 12 or so. i went to bed and slept soundly until 5am when i awoke and decided to measure my room to see if i could rearrange it. i meant to take notes of all the dimensions before i left this morning, but i forgot. so now i will be doing that nextw eekend instead.

anyway, i was tired again so i slept until some other time - 9 or 10 and watched tv in bed until after noon. i went downstairs to see what higgi was doing and i had planned to go to the gym, watch a movie, then start packing for my trip and organizing my room - i HATE coming home to a mess after a long trip. so i sat down to talk to higgi and i proposed mimosas. he was game, of course, ha! and so i got some bubbly and oj. then higgi proposed we watch alias. he's trying to re-learn me one of my favorite shows. so we start watching and after 2 episodes, i told him we had to pause it so i could make some kale chips. apparently these are all the rave now. i was listening to a podcast on bloomberg businessweek today and they talked about this company that is SELLING kale chips, which i just made in my kitchen. its basically put oil on kale, salt and pepper it and then bake them. its super easy. although, technically, the first time i did it i burnt them. but whatever. anyway, i make the kale chips and higgs and i go back to watching alias.

at some point, he gets up to go to the kitchen to get something to eat or drink and he comes back to the living room, and i'm sitting with my back to the door out to the patio and he screams and points "danielle! there's water all around you!" i had NO idea what he was talking about. i look down and sure enough, water. everywhere. it had just started pouring outside and there isn't a really good seal between the door outside and the rotting wood. oh, and the little well outside the door doesn't drain properly. i guess it rained so much and so quickly that the water had no where to go but IN the house. we leaped in to action (after i paused the show and put my laptop away, of course). we got towels to block the water by the door and by this time, the water has spread to the other side of the living room about to head into the dining room. i laid towels around the perimeter of the water to stop it from traveling further. ryan moved the furniture out of the way and i picked up some extra chairs and my magazine rack. we had to stop the water from coming in the door, so we opened another door (which looks like a window, but technically we have three "doors" outside but we only use one) which had been re-done a few years ago (the last time the apartment flooded back in 2007 - same problem that it wasn't draining, so they decided to only do the two wells that had flooded - not the third which flooded this time). so higgs goes outside in the POURING RAIN and within about 10 seconds is drenched from head to toe all the way through his skin. he had a mini portable sump pump that we were going to stick into the well to get the water to pump back into the garden. but the hoses wouldn't connect to it. we must've been missing a part. so higgs puts the sump pump into the water without a hose and we let it just drain into the well that was working properly. it was a catastrophe. i mean, not like oil spill or anything, but for city-living, it was a mess. i'm still trying to think of how quickly it all happened - it started flooding in the apartment within a few minutes of it starting to rain. less than a half hour.

so it finally stops raining as much and we go to start cleaning up the water inside the apartment. i had laid this big, pink rug that i LOVE down in the middle of the inch of water to absorb it and higgs realizes that the rug is BLEEDING pink EVERYWHERE. we obviously dont want to stain the floor, or the living room rug (which was already soaked), so we picked that up and put it outside. i was expecting the rain to stay bad for a long time based on the weather report, so i called family friends to see if they could take us to target to get a wet vac. i'm imagining we're going to spend the rest of the day and night like they did at my aunt and uncle's house 2 years ago where the water was coming in so quickly, they just stood at the doors sucking it up into the wet vac and then dumping it every half hour or so. but the rain slowed and then stopped, so we just had to clean up. our family friends were watching the soccer match in the north end and only had a two-seater car anyway (that probably couldn't have fit a wet vac), so higgs remembered his gma had a wet vac. we called her and her boyfriend and they came over about 45 min later with a wet vac and mop. before they came over, we spent the time taking towels, lapping up the water, then ringing them out outside. when the wet vac arrived, i wet vaced the rug and ryan mopped the floor. we have cement/tile floors, but they were still kind of damp, so we let them air out overnight. higgs had a wedding to go to (we thought he wouldn't be able to go, but it ended up being fine) and so he left. i did all of the laundry - it took me 5 or 6 hours to wash and dry all the towels and rugs and made fajitas for me to enjoy. i didnt finish laundry until 10pm or so and i still had to clean my room and pack for my trip. i did the latter, not the former. i was up packing until midnight and then woke up at 4:30 for my flight.

crazy days. or just day. apologies for my typing - i'm on a bumpy plane and i cant actually see my computer screen bcs the person in front of me has his seat reclined.

how was YOUR saturday??

[Good Riddance Time of Your Life from 1998 is on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the 90s List by Green Day. i thought it ironic and funny - good riddance to the flood and there always seems to be a flood around me (which is always a fun time of my life) - who would've thought i'd be fighting a flood in BOSTON??]