Happy Halloween!

Thank you Grandma Susan for turning our little monkey into a 'real' monkey this Halloween!

Triathlon report

Hi, this is Mark again. I did something last Sunday I'd never done before. I competed in a triathlon. In conversations with coworkers and others unfamiliar with triathlon, I've learned that when most people hear "triathlon" they think of the ironman - an extreme endurance race consisting of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile run. In other words, something only for crazy people who have nothing else to do but train for the event. The triathlon I did is called a "sprint distance" tri. 300 meter swim, 10 mile bike, and 3 mile run. Okay, it's not as impressive as the ironman, but it was a fair amount of training, and I was proud to have done it. My time was 1:21:36 including all transitions.
The hardest part for me was the swim. I learned how to swim at a young age, and am comfortable in the water, but that's the extent of my ability. 300M is very short by "real" swimmers' standards, but it was a big challenge for me to get to the point of being able to complete the distance. This one was held in a lake, which is another challenge - you can't see and there's no lanes dividing you from the other swimmers. Now that I managed to do it though, I'd really like to get better at swimming. I'm sure there will be a day when other sports are too rough on the joints and swimming may be all that's left for exercise. I don't know if I'd say I enjoy it yet, but I'm getting there.
Katherine swam on a team as a youngster, and watching the triathlon gave her the swimming bug a little bit, so we went together for a swim tonight. I found it so much more fun with someone else, and it was really neat to see how good of a swimmer she is, even after all these years. It's really fun to learn something new about your spouse after eight years of marriage.
The other part of the triathlon that was new to me is the transitions. Your bike is placed on a rack and you have a small area around it which has all the gear you need throughout the race - bike shoes and helmet, socks, running shoes, gatorade, and a bunch of small stuff. In order to minimize the transition time, all the gear is laid out very carefully in the order it will be needed. Katherine made fun of my running shoes with their special elastic laces, but those laces saved me 10-15 seconds! Of the various running and biking events I've done the past few years, I'd have to say the triathlon is the most fun. The others have their rewards, but it's just so neat to combine the different sports into one race. I'm definitely looking forward to doing this again!

Here are some pictures from the event. This is before the race, getting ready for the swim with friends.

The start is done in waves based on gender and age. Here are the over-40 men about to go.

This is the transition area. That's me in the red shirt all the way on the other side.

Here I am coming out of transition to start the run portion. I had just seen my cheering family, hence the big smile.

It was awesome to have Katherine and Ben there for cheering support. They came with our housemates, Randy and Babette and their daughter Megan. Babette also competed, and was actually competitive! She placed second in her age group.

Chuggin' Along

Tomorrow will start week 5 since we've been "homeless" (we left mid-day four Thursdays ago), and I think we're in pretty fine spirits considering. :)

Benjamin is doing GREAT at school - and in fact seemed pretty disappointed to not be going to school on Saturday - and was not shy to let me know! He fussed whenever we went back upstairs after being downstairs (ie instead of heading out the door), brought me his shoes several times and mine once, and even tried to hand me my work briefcase. Sorry Ben, I had to keep saying, no school today. You're stuck with me. I didn't quite know whether to be happy that he enjoyed going to school so much, or somewhat sad that he quite markedly prefers school over hanging out at home with mom. I'm going with happy, because I feel zero guilt dropping him off each morning. And he has yet to shed a tear over my departure.

We've made some progress with the house. The contractor we hired to complete the flood remediation piece (dry wall tear-out and "microban" application (to halt any mold growth)) began work last Thursday. Through them, we hired movers to box up our stuff and put it in a storage locker - and they did this on Saturday. It's the first time we've done this (ie instead of packing it ourselves) - wish we could have enjoyed the experience a bit more. :) Mark was there for the first couple of hours giving guidance to the flood remediation workers, who were still working around our stuff and around the movers. But they did much of the packing without us there, so I'm hoping our stuff is in good shape when we get to it - which will likely not be for a number of weeks yet. It makes me a bit nervous about what condition we'll find stuff - and it will be hard to sort through since we have no idea what stuff is in which boxes. But in the end it's just stuff, I suppose, and we're looking at this as a good exercise to rid ourselves of non-essentials. In fact, I'm probably going to want to clean and sanitize just about everything before bringing it back into the house - as I don't know what was touched by flood waters, and the stuff that wasn't touched may be boxed up with stuff that was... Our plan is to try to find our bed (or borrow an air mattress) and bring Ben's pack-n-play with us when the house is ready to be inhabited again and slowly bring over a car-full of boxes each day to sort and clean - eventually renting a truck for the final furniture. Not going to be an easy process, but I'm looking forward to a much simpler household in the end.

Right now our house has been completely gutted, and the air movers are blowing air around our house. I'm not sure how much longer they stay. Mark met with the first contractor for the repair/rebuild today. We had been really close to hiring this contractor to do some work in remodeling our carport/garage - so now we'll divert the funds to home repair. We already know that insurance will not cover all the necessary rebuild pieces, and we want to make a few upgrades as well (flooring and bathroom, primarily - but also possibly some electrical re-wiring). We'll get an estimate when he has the dimension information from the insurance company (about a week), and I'm a bit nervous about what the final price tag will be. Mark is meeting with this contractor's flooring subcontractor tomorrow, and with an alternate prime contractor on Friday.

Our Contractor (Chris is his name - probably should start just calling him by name, as there may be many more entries that refer to him!) gave us an initial ballpark estimate of 6 weeks - 2 months to complete the work. So Thanksgiving will be the earliest we could be back in the house. I had my eyes on Thanksgiving, but I may need to re-adjust to Christmas to make it more realistic and not be disappointed.

So below are some pictures from various stages of our house

These first few pictures were what the house looked like when I returned from Oregon. As you can see, our stuff was everywhere and Mark had begun cutting away the bottom few inches (then finally bottom foot or so) or the drywall. Little did I know this was just the beginning!

Then the professionals came and removed even more wall. This is my favorite picture to just show how weird this all was. Four feet and down the wall was cut away, but then everything higher was left in-tact. Notice the quilts on the wall in this picture below. They normally hung above our bed. The contractor originally thought they could work around our stuff. So they piled it all in the middle of each room and draped a tarp over it to protect it from dust.

These pictures show our house getting closer to finished as far as the remediation goes...

Here's our kitchen. Yep, this is the kitchen that Mark personally remodelled just two years ago. They ripped out the base cabinets, but were able to salvage the granite. A separate contractor was brought in to remove and store the granite. Hope we can find his phone number when it comes time to put it back...

Here is a shot from Ben's room looking towards the guest room. We had wood floors over concrete slab - and apparently this was how wood floors were installed in the 50s - the boards the flooring was nailed to "floats" on tar on top of the slab. Interesting.

Here's a shot from our Den looking towards the percussion studio. In this room we had paneling, so the entire wall had to come down. You're looking at the back of the top half of the drywall from the studio. That paneling is one thing we won't miss.

And finally here's a shot in our master bathroom. This is where the sink/vanity were - and the tile did not extend behind it, so the entire thing had to be removed. They actually found mold behind the tile too, so pretty much all the bathroom tile had to come down. We're not terribly disappointed about that, as we had intended to remodel the bathrooms eventually, just not right now and not in this manner.

And what blog entry would be complete without a few pictures of the B-dogg?

Daddy and Ben snuggling one morning soon after our reunion as a family post-hurricane

Ben recently discovered the joy of "folding" laundry. He spent a good twenty minutes sorting the laundry when I captured this picture. Too bad I had both clean and dirty laundry accessible at this time...

Ben's First Day of School!
Ben and his teacher Ms. Nathalie

Finally, thank you again for all the phone calls and notes - I'm sorry I haven't gotten back to pretty much everyone. Slowly but surely our life is beginning to resemble something normal again. Okay, maybe normal is not the word, as most people don't live on the third story of their friends' home - but as normal as normal can be for a family displaced who is trying to rebuild their home. All this to say, I will get back to you - eventually!

The Long Haul

The story keeps unraveling, and it's amazing to me how much damage 3 inches of water can wreak.

Today marks the beginning of week 4 of being homeless. Our spirits are pretty high, I think, considering - but the daily stresses prove for moments of pretty significant lows. Mark and I are trying to take a divide and conquer approach so that we don't get overwhelmed and frustrated - but it's hard to relinquish some of the "control" over the situation. We've pretty much decided that he's going to take the lead in figuring things out, hiring contractors, etc. and will ask for my input on big decisions/when he needs it - of course, keeping me clued into the process. I'm taking the lead on making sure Ben has something to do during the day (which means taking him to and from school, and then finding something to do "after school," as our Loft, as wonderful as it is, is pretty limited in its' capacity to entertain an almost 16-month old), and then we co-team for mornings and evenings - as it takes two to get him ready and fed and all three of us out the door in the morning, and similarly fed and ready for bed at night. (Remember, that we are on the third floor - the kitchen is on the first floor, and is not babyproofed, so it's two flights up and down with Ben, and he pretty much has to be strapped in to his high chair if we're downstairs).

The amount of work that needs to be done to the house seems to grow daily. The claims agent came to the house on Monday (or maybe it was Tuesday, I can't quite remember already). She recommends that all the flooring be replaced and the bottom 4-feet of wall be removed for the entire house. This is convenient for some reasons (ie we can finally get rid of the den paneling that we've wanted removed for some time), and really a headache for others (the base kitchen cabinets which Mark personally installed must be replaced, and the granite salvaged for the new cabinets).

Time-wise we're thinking this may take another 6 weeks, but we could be drastically off in either direction. Once we actually hire a contractor for the entirety of the work, we should have a better estimate.

We're also losing a lot of furniture - not necessarily because it's horribly damaged, but because of the big "question mark" whether it has some damage. The claims agent is pretty aggressive in declaring things that can be claimed and replaced, which is generous - and I suppose we'd rather err on the side of replacing things that maybe don't need to be replaced, then find out something is mildewy or rusty further down the road. But neither of us are big on shopping for big ticket items, and the number of things that we'll have to make decisions about can be pretty overwhelming for us.

Then there's the job of hiring contractors. Some do it all (tear out, sanitize/de-mold and reconstruct). Some only do a little. Some can start right away, some have a wait. They all say that our stuff needs to be removed and put into storage (the stuff we're keeping, that is) - but some will clean, pack and store it for you. Some won't. And then finding a place to store it is hard to come by now. Plus, it looks like we may have to pay for this part out-of-pocket. Ugh.

We actually hired a company to start the work today (as they came out to do an estimate and said they could start right away - the house is starting to stink from the water trapped behind the paneling, so we are anxious to get started), and they said that they didn't actually need to remove our stuff. But then later decided that they do. But they won't move it. So Mark's trying to find a moving company that will move and store it. Or he's considering firing the current contractor and hiring one of the other companies that will move and store it in addition to the removal/sanitation. Too many decisions.

I know this is rambling, but it feels good to be connected again, and if I don't just start typing some of our experiences, I'll get overwhelmed and not know where to begin, and I really want to document this whole experience. I think you get a taste for what we're going through.

On the bright side, Benjamin started "School" (MDO) on Monday, and he is doing just GREAT! Seriously, it is such a relief now to think that he'll not only be able to handle the separation, but that he can do it five days a week, and that he is actually doing well and having fun. It just thrills me, and takes so much stress off Mark and I, as it's overwhelming to try to both work, take care of all this mess with our house, let alone care for a small child in someone else's house.

I got some fun pictures of us with Ben dressed up for his first day of school, and him with his teacher in the classroom, but I'll have to post them when I figure out how to do it on our laptop.

So some details about the program: It's 9-3 M-F at a nearby (nearby to our house, not our loft) Lutheran church. The teacher is FANTASTIC, and is pretty much the reason we chose the school. I'm not sure how I feel about the teachers for the next class, but we really feel this was the best place to introduce Ben to "corporate care." I am still a huge fan of Montessori, so we're still working on finding an appropriate program for Ben's next move. But I hope he'll be in his current class for the next 6-months.

But anyways, the church just opened up the "infant" program (12-18 months) in January, so it's quite small. It has four students and one teacher (although it's still not full, so two days per week, it's just three students and one teacher), and the teacher has a master's degree in Early Childhood Education. I can really tell she knows this age group and how to properly stimulate them. And the infant room is large, as it doubles as the church nursery on Sundays, so the kids have lots of room to move around. We visited the class a few times before enrolling Ben, and it was so peaceful (probably because there were only two kids enrolled at the time), and the children seemed content. A huge bonus for me was that the teacher was totally happy to chat with us, and seemed really at ease with us being there. (more some other day on the Montessori that we pulled Ben out of prior to enrollment - which was largely due to this factor). She's got a neat little schedule for them, which includes daily stroller walks, time on the playground or time in the gym (with many balls, ride on toys, etc available), and the kids go to Chapel twice per week where they have music and bible stories. She also has one or two "learning objectives" per day - ie. she has pictures of some toys in a bucket for a "matching" game. Today they shined a flashlight on objects and talked about "on" and "off." And the children sleep on Nap Matts, which Ben took to immediately! He saw the other kids lay down on their matts, so he did the same, and is apparently already the best sleeper in the class - sleeping for 1.5-2 hours! She's great with the kids, great with me (ie gives me "nuggets" about Ben's day when I pick him up), and Ben seems happy when I pick him up. Today he was smiling and "flirting" with his teacher when I was holding him and talking to her at pick-up time - a great sign. And he only fussed a bit on the first day that I dropped him off. Day 2 & 3 Mark dropped him off, and apparently he didn't fuss a bit - and even walked into the classroom himself. I couldn't be more pleased with the school and how he's doing, and I think it is such a HUGE blessing amid all that we're going through. Please keep your fingers crossed that it continues this way!

So, I think that catches up for the most part of what we've been up to the last few days. I'll try to update more often, as it does help me feel less scattered and a bit more normal. But now I'd like to catch the rest of the vice presidential debate, and perhaps have a bowl of Blue Bell (full fat!) mint chocolate chip ice cream. Yum!

Oh - and THANK YOU to whoever sent the packages of board books! What a treat for Ben to have some new books to look at - not only because so many of his flooded out - but also because I tried to go to the library today to pay for the borrowed books that were destroyed (and to check out some new ones) - and apparently it sustained some damage as well, as it had a sign that said "Closed until further notice." Please let us know if you sent the books so we can properly thank you!

Good night, everyone!