On Tuesday, August 23rd I was with my family at the Red Lobster in Charlottesville, VA to surprise my grandma for her 75th birthday.

During our lunch we experienced a magnitude 5.8 earthquake. The building started rumbling, everything was shaking, and my aunt was ready to make us all duck and cover if it had lasted a second longer. It sounded as though an airplane was about to land on our table. It was a scary few seconds.

On Saturday, August 27th Steve and I woke up and checked the radar to see that Hurricane Irene was headed our way. The day before, I kept asking Steve if there was anything we needed to do to prepare and he kept assuring me that we would be fine. After he studied the radar and read his weather blog that morning, he was convinced we needed to go out and buy a generator to be able to run our sump pump in the event that our power went out. Of course, every home improvement store in the area was sold out...so we just HAD to drive about 100 miles south (in the rain) to Ruckersville, VA (never even heard of that place before) where they only had one model in stock that was $800(!). We brought it home where we sat it in our garage and decided we would leave it in the box unless we needed to use it. Then our power flickered twice. We got nervous. We decided to put it together so we'd be ready to use it. Once it was together we turned it on for a second to test it. It was SO.LOUD. I told Steve there was absolutely no way in the world I would let him turn that thing on during the night. Just about every neighbor on our street has at least one child under the age of two and there was no way I was going to be responsible for waking a sleeping baby. Our power never did go out that night. The next morning, we decided we would box up the generator and return it. I called the store and it turns out they're supposed to be final sale but nobody told us that. We were so bummed...what in the world were we going to do with such an expensive thing that we could never even use?! After thinking it over, we decided we'd try to take it to the store anyway. We figured maybe it would be harder for them to say no to us in person. Luckily for us, when we tried to return it there was a couple that saw us bringing it in and they were stalking us by the returns counter. The salesman told us they'd make an exception since they had a potential sale for it. We returned it and excitedly got out of the store as fast as we could!

After returning the generator on Sunday, August 28th, we decided to make a trip to the Toyota dealer that we'd visited a few days prior. My car has been having some issues lately, making me stressed and nervous anytime I drive somewhere. The final straw was when it decided to show us its overheating trick again during our generator adventure. We had been eying a 2011 Highlander on their lot (and another similar one). Turns out the one we wanted sold the day before (during the hurricane!) and the similar one sold that morning. Bummer! We asked if any other dealer had one like it - we really wanted the Magnetic Gray color. Nope. Nowhere. All the dealers are short 2011 vehicles due to the earthquake in Japan. They only had about four 2011 Highlanders left on their lot, which was more than most other dealers in the area. We looked at a black one and ended up driving home with it! We had no intention of buying a car that day, but we couldn't take a chance in waiting any longer. SO exciting!

Then came Thursday, September 8th. I left school just before 5pm in the pouring rain. It had been raining for the past 3 days, but this was the hardest yet. I drove home (in the new car) gripping the steering wheel so tight and driving behind the slowest driver I could find. The rain started coming down in buckets. Water was splashing over my car from every direction. I just prayed I could hurry up and get home. As I walked into our house, I heard our sump pump running constantly so I ran downstairs to make sure everything was okay. Things were fine. Steve called and said he was only a few minutes away. I kept checking the basement every few minutes because I was nervous that the sump pump was running so much. While on the phone with my grandparents, I went downstairs to check on things again and this is what I found:


I.freaked.out. I didn't know what to do. I called Steve crying. He was stuck at the intersection down the street from our house because it was flooded so badly. He said he'd turn around and try another route and he'd be home soon. In the meantime, not knowing what to do, I went outside with my rain boots and rain jacket with a bucket to start scooping some of the water out of our stairwell. I carried about 10 buckets, but there was no way I could keep up with the amount of rain that was falling so I gave up. I just stood in our basement spinning circles, from looking at the utility room, to looking at our back door feeling so helpless. I just watched in shock as the water kept creeping in more and more. I ran around frantically trying to pick up everything off the carpet. I picked up the BluRay player from under our tv stand and got shocked so badly. I wasn't even thinking I was just trying to save everything. As I walked around I could see the water rippling under the carpet, as though I was walking across a water bed. I kept calling Steve...he tried so many different roads to get home and every option was flooded. Here's a picture of an intersection near our house...it's just unbelievable.

Source

There was no way he could get to me. He went to my aunt's house to get off the roads. A few hours later he finally made it home. Our entire basement was soaked. There was nothing we could do. We went to bed, but neither of us slept well the entire night. We woke up super early Friday morning to figure out what to do. We looked up companies to call and started calling and leaving messages before they opened. We called one company persistently and they said they could be out to us by Sunday at the latest. Other companies said they were booking appointments for Tuesday. Tuesday! We went ahead and borrowed a shopvac from two of our neighbors and figured we'd try to at least get some water away from the baseboards in the meantime. While vacuuming up water, we got a call that a guy would be at our house in 30 minutes to assess the damage. While he was here assessing the crew showed up to get to work on the cleanup.
Now our basement looks like this:

The worst part was watching all of our hard work that we did in the pool room be ripped apart. We are heartbroken.