Christmas Holidays, Part I

      2 Comments on Christmas Holidays, Part I

IMG_7645-2

Christmas is over, and a new year is upon us. Wait…what? When did that happen?? My holidays are kind of a blur, because they were maybe a bit more eventful than we bargained for.  Ok, a lot more eventful. To explain will take more than one post…so let’s get started!We actually traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina to visit my dad, stepmother, grandmother, and sister. (My last post was actually from North Carolina…ha, I’m so sneaky.)

But instead of using my time off work to leisurely pack for a 12-hour drive and week-long vacation, I spent the days leading up to Christmas working on my hockey photo project while attending 4 hockey games. Too much hockey that close to Christmas!! :p Tuesday night we had the last game, and when I got home, I was still staring down the barrel of my unfinished Christmas cards. All 80 of them, handmade, doncha know. 😮

The boys did a lot of cutting, punching and sticking for me this year, bless their hearts. I stayed up til about 1:30am Wednesday morning before I finally realized that there was no way I’d be able to get them done and leave at 8am when my husband got home from work. I hadn’t even started packing yet! So I texted my husband and told him he could sleep all day and we’d leave in the afternoon. Probably better for everyone in the long run.We left for North Carolina on December 23rd at 5pm, and thanks to a bit of a miscommunication between my husband and me…we ended up driving straight through! *thud* We arrived in Raleigh around 6am, but we knew they weren’t expecting us so early, so we stopped at a Waffle House for breakfast. (Worst breakfast ever.)We got to my parents at 7am, and I took a 4-hour nap. But then I had to get up, because a) the hockey project wasn’t done and b) my brother and his family arrived to celebrate Christmas Eve. We celebrated with lots of food and drink, then we went to bed around 10pm.

Friday is my normal run day, so I got up to run before the rest of the crew woke up on Christmas Day. I’ll talk about running and food in the next post. (Plenty to discuss on that front.)  We had a nice Christmas gathering, and it was great spending the holiday with family I don’t often get to see.

IMG_7645

FullSizeRender

First photo is my dad, handing out presents, while the second is my step-mother, sister, and I, having mimosas for Christmas!

The family went out to see the new Star Wars movie, but I stayed back to hang with my step-mother and grandma…I got to stuff a turkey, lol!

The next day, we took the kids to a trampoline place, and they had a blast.

IMG_7670

We joked that my 4-year-old niece, who likes to dress herself, looked like she came right out of an 80s Olivia Newton John video. 😉

IMG_7667

We had lunch at at rather famous local place in Raleigh called Beasley’s. We waited an hour to be seated!

IMG_7673

But it was worth it! And I loved that our drinks came in jelly jars. 😉

IMG_7674

Later that night, my siblings and I, along with two of our spouses, had a “parents night out.”

FullSizeRender - Copy

IMG_7685

We went to a karaoke bar and my sister actually got up and sang!

IMG_7688

I had no idea she could sing!

So, I haven’t talked about the weather yet…but let me tell you, it was crazy warm! When I woke up each morning, anywhere between 5-7am, it was 68-70 degrees! And humid. :/. Still, I wasn’t complaining (except for when I was running). In fact, on Sunday, my cousin had a party to watch the Panthers game, and it was so warm, it actually became a pool party!

FullSizeRender (1)

Best December 27th ever. ;).

On the way home from the party (the Panthers lost, boo hoo), we went out for Mexican after some shopping. As it turned out, that was not a good idea.  Don’t get me wrong, the food was great, but later that evening, JJ’s belly finally decided it couldn’t handle all the food he’d ingested (he ate a lot at the party), and at about 4am, Jamie came into the room where Jay and I were sleeping to let us know that JJ had thrown up.  And let me tell you, when that boy’s stomach rebels, it really puts forth the effort!  It took me close to an hour to clean up the top bunk of my nephew’s bunk bed.  And yet, my nephew in the bottom bunk slept through all of it!

Monday, my boys wanted to take their cousin (same nephew mentioned above, aged 7) to a local ice arena for public skate. He’d never skated before, but he did great!

IMG_7720

IMG_7731

They all had a great time. Afterward, we went to the Carolina Ale House for dinner. It was fun!

IMG_7737

IMG_7739

Even Grandma came, though mom had to stay home because she wasn’t feeling well.  We made sure JJ ate less. 😉

As much as I love my family, by Monday night, we had had enough.  There are currently three generations living under one roof at my dad’s house (until my sister and brother-in-law close on their house next month), and things can get a bit…testy. 😛  Add our family of four into the mix, and let’s just say that by Tuesday morning, I was ready to go. 😉  I got up for my Tuesday run, then we packed up and were out the door by 9am…only to turn back around because we’d left my heart rate monitor behind.  *sigh*  Thus, we were on the road for real at 9:30am, with bright, sunny skies and warm temps to enjoy.  It was a great morning!  And then…

At about 11:15 that morning, we had just stopped at a gas station north of Winston-Salem.  As I was getting out of the car for a pit stop, I saw that I had a Facebook message from my neighbor.  She was feeding our cats and watching the house for us, and she’d given us a couple of updates while we were gone.  This update wasn’t quite what I expected, though…

Are you on your way home? I hate to even tell you this but I just went to check the cats and your basement has water. I didn’t make it over there last night because we had water coming in too. We have power but you don’t. I’m so sorry.

😮  Oh no.  Just…oh no.   To understand the situation, you have to first know that our house is 104 years old, but the foundation dates from much earlier, possibly as early as 1874, based on my research.  If you walk into our basement, you will most likely have to stoop, because it’s what’s known around here as a “Michigan basement.”  That means it’s more like a glorified crawl space, with a cement floor, but not at all finished.  In Monroe County, these basements are popular, but even if you do have a finished basement here, you most likely have at least one sump pump.  I don’t know why this is (they weren’t common where I grew up in the suburbs), but it just seems to be the thing that everyone has a sump pump (or two or three) to keep the water out of the basement.  Now, if you know anything about sump pumps, you know they run on electricity…and if the house loses power…  😮  The power loss might not have been so bad, if it weren’t for the fact that we had a big ice and rain storm on Monday, bringing more than 2 inches of rain to our area in 24 hours.  🙁

The bottom line is that the higher part of our basement had 4 inches of water, while the furnace room, which is lower, had 7 inches of water.  Ugh.  And I was finding all this out when I was still about 10 hours from home. Ugggggggggggghhhhhhhh. The good news is, we only use the basement for storage but the bad news is, my neighbor informed me that everything that wasn’t on a shelf was pretty much floating in water.

On the bright side, when I texted my mom, she and her fiance dropped what they were doing and drove down to my house with their generator.  Randy (the fiance) then trudged through all the water in both parts of the basement to plug in both sump pumps.  My mom checked on the fridge and determined that, unfortunately, everything inside was a total loss.  That tells me that the power outage was probably not due to the storms on Monday, because the food in the freezer wouldn’t have completely thawed in 24 hours.  My weather station stopped sending data to the web about 10pm Sunday night, and although I didn’t think much about it at the time (it goes down sometimes “just because”), I now think the power went out then.  So that was almost 72 hours that my house was without electricity!

However, to stay on the positive side, I was able to call the power company and report the outage while still in North Carolina, and they came out and fixed it about an hour before we got home. So, thanks to my neighbor checking on my house, I didn’t come home to a flooded basement and no power at 11pm Tuesday night!

he last few days have been spent cleaning out the fridge and the basement.  We had a ton of food that had to be tossed (that’s what I get for thinking that I could grocery shop before we left, thus saving myself from having to do it when we returned from vacation :-P), but the fridge is now beautifully clean.  So clean, I don’t even want to put anything in it, ha ha!  The basement is still a work in progress, but the truth is, we had a lot of crap in there that we needed to get rid of.  And I can walk around in it now without knocking over piles, ha ha!

IMG_7853

IMG_7852

IMG_7851

IMG_7850

a href=”http://thatloudredhead.com/tlr/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IMG_7849.jpg”>IMG_7849

IMG_7848

See those limestone walls?  I told you it was old!!!  I’ve always felt our basement was kind of gross and creepy, but after spending so much time in it this week, I’m totally over that. 😉  My goal is to have it be clean enough that I might not be embarrassed to take someone down there in the future.  From a historical standpoint, it’s pretty impressive, at any rate. 😉

That’s enough for now!  I told we had an exciting holiday!  I didn’t talk at all about health or fitness in this one, but my next post will recount my eating and exercise for the holidays.  Because that’s important, too, right? 🙂

Thanks for reading!

2 thoughts on “Christmas Holidays, Part I

  1. Kitty

    As I was reading about your visit to your family, I was thinking I was already exhausted just reading it. It sounds like it was a lot of fun, but a really busy time (I will be interested to hear about how the activity and food went — that trip must have been challenging).

    But, then I got to the part about your basement! So, not great to return to. On the other hand…well, you got your basement cleaned out…

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *