THOR, ARE YOU ANGRY WITH ME?!!!

For my non-comic book reader readers of this blog let me explain the title of this installment before preceding with my usual clever witticisms. THOR is the Norse God of thunder and lightning and therefore RAIN also. Thor has the ability to control the rain. I like Thor as a comic book character quite a bit. He's always been one of my favorites in fact. I dressed up as him for Halloween one year and also wore the costume the one-and-only time I ever dressed up for a comic convention (it was during Halloween so don't think me too geeky)! So, I think I've paid proper homage to Thor.

So, then, why the Hell has he decided to deluge my house with so much friggin' rain?

Here's the scoop...as the whole world knos by now we in the midwest have been absolutely hammered (Thor's hammer?) these past couple weeks by flash flood thunderstorms and tornadoes. It's been all over the news. What you may not know is that the Tuesday of last week my roofers began re-roofing my house. They just finished today BTW but not without some minor...shall we say...difficulties and delays.

They were only able to work sporadically that first week doing some prep work--getting things ready and fixing some of the overhang, gutters, trim, etc. before going full-steam ahead on the tear off and re-shingling. They couldn't go full-steam ahead the first few days because we were getting rain here-and-there. Nothing too major but steady. Then, on Saturday of last week they finally started the real work of tearing the old shingles of the north side of the house. They got about 4-5 hours of heavy duty work in when the skies to the west turned very dark indeed. The news started reporting frightening accounts of rain damage to our fellow Wisconsinites to the west and warned everyone here to get to shelter and fast...the storm was heading our way and fast!

So I go out and tell the roofers to batten down the hatches and get the hell out of Dodge. They said "Thank you, okay" and I headed to the basement with Sandy and Stella. 25 minutes later it hit! Our tenant even joined us in the basement with a plate of pizza and we all road out the storm together. She mentioned seeing the roofers on the back stoop of the house and I scrambled up and asked them to come inside. They politely declined. What could I do?

So, the storm finally blows over and I notice some water seeping into the basement. Not a lot though really. Nothing overly serious. But I start cleaning it up as the girls head upstairs. 2 minutes later Stella comes running back down screaming for me to get upstairs...there's something wrong in my room! So I run up to our bedroom on the second level (we own a 3 story duplex) and Sandy's in there freaking. We've got water running--RUSHING--down the walls of our bedroom! The floor is getting saturated and the window well filling up. We start blowing fans on the walls and throw towels along the baseboards trying in vain to soak up as much water as we can.

Then our tenant calls and reports the same thing happening in her room directly below us! Then the ceiling starts to drip from a few little spots! So now we're running around putting buckets down and running a fan and more towels downstairs for our tenant! Then Sandy goes up to our 3rd floor where my comic book room is and, mercifully, there's no water there but our studio where we work has water coming down the walls as well! F**K!!!!! This quickly becomes worse as the rain continues to batter the house...No, it never stopped, folks, the warnings of tornadoes were canceled but the flash flood warnings are still in effect. I run outside to see if the roofers are still here and if the tarped the roof like they were supposed to!

No and no.

OH. MY. GOD. We are in deep shit.

I run back inside and call the owner of the contracting company we hired and tell him what's going on. He freaks. He can't believe they didn't tarp the exposed roof! It's too late now to do anything and he says we have to "ride it out" and hope the rain stops soon.

It doesn't.

It pours for the next 4-5 hours and the water continues to invade our home. It's now coming in from several spots in our ceiling and still running down the walls. By 10pm the ceiling in our bedroom is starting to bow and the water is no longer dripping from it but actually running like a faucet from several spots. The buckets continue to fill up and we have about 14 of them on the floor (thank goodness we saved all the empty litter buckets!).

We slept little that night and it rained throughout.

The next day we assess the damage. The ceilings in our bedroom and studio are seriously damaged. By noon on Sunday the one in our bedroom collapses from the weight of all that water it's soaked up.

We find that the carpet up in the studio is soaked as well and several boxes of my comics are waterlogged. The walls in our bedroom and the tenants bedroom are visibly bulging out and will obviously need replacing and thoughts of mold begin to scare the living bejeezus out of us.

Calls begin to the contractor and his insurance company. The nightmare is far from over as more rain hits us Sunday. Thankfully Skip (the contractor) has his crew out here early tarping the roof so no more rain gets in...well, some did but just a little. Monday we get a reprieve but Tuesday we get more rain. And more on Wednesday and the next day and I lose track.

As of today we sit here with 8 fans and 3 dehumidifiers (I had to go out and buy 2 dehumidifiers and a wet vac Sunday morning) still running continuously throughout the house. The celing in the studio has held but it's bowing out. The house is in complete dissarray as we've had to move everything on the north end out of harm's way. We're sleeping on the couch and futon until the repairs can be made.

And we're still waiting to hear back from the contractor's insurance agent.

Thor, what did I do to piss you off?

word.

r