You may remember that in late June, severe storms rocked northwestern Ohio.  During the downpours, Sherry and I simply did not want to look in the basement.  We knew that there was a possibility of some water down there, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it if water did come in.  There was no place to put stuff that was down there, so we chose to worry about it “later.”

“Later” was yesterday.  I spent most of the day packing out soggy cardboard boxes, trashing various objects, and drying and repackaging what could be saved into plastic totes.  Where there was mold–or even just damp areas that looked like they might get moldy–I sprayed bleach.  Between the dehumidifier and three fans, ventilation was pretty good, but by the end of the day, I was ready to be away from bleach.

This morning I continued the work.  Just need to pack out the last of the trash.  There’s still stuff in boxes, but it was all off the floor.  However, we’re going to be getting everything into totes ASAP.

The major damage seemed to be to our Big Box of Games.  These were games that we moved from IL and hadn’t unpacked.  We lost Risk, Clue, two versions of Trivial Pursuit, Star Wars Monopoly, Yahtzee, Parcheesi, a Dilbert card game, Scrabble, Scattergories (not one of my favorites anyways), and some others.  There were also some photos that got damaged although some precious memories were safe.

After I’m done with my Pepsi break, I’m diving back in to do some clean up before calling Phase I complete.

Oh, to accompany my work, I started listening to Amy Tan reading her latest novel Saving Fish from Drowning. Tan has a wonderful reading voice that makes just about anything she’s reading sound great.  It wasn’t until about the second disc in that I realized I had no idea what the story was about.  Went back a little and now seem to know what’s going on.  There is this nice little conceit of the narrator being a dead woman watching her friends go on a trip she had planned.  The narrator is definitely “limited omniscient” in the sense that she’s giving us all kinds of background on the characters that the others don’t know.  I’m not totally engaged yet, but I’m willing to go along.