Anson enjoyed meeting some Spanish girlies!
Amy being blessed with Holy water
Us with Hugo and his wife Sulie and daughter AmyI almost don't know where to start! It has been a very eventful time since our last post a week ago...
On Friday and Saturday we went to Nashville. Dusty's head painter, Hugo, invited us to go to his daughters Catholic Baptism at his family's church there. We were very honored to be the only "gringos" invited and had a great time! He has a very large family and he actually bought and butchered a whole cow just for the occasion! So after the baptism we went to his family's house for the feast. It was really good! They filleted a lot of the meat and grilled it for fajitas, which we ate on tortillas with black beans and fresh salsa. Yum! We left there Saturday afternoon to come home for the Florida game at 8:00pm. We got home in plenty of time, only to find that we had a huge storm and we had no phone service. Not good news for people whose only connection to the modern world is through the internet! Dusty was all set to watch the game online and was very depresses to find out they would have it fixed by Wednesday! (Keep in mind it was only Saturday!) Hence the reason I have not posted for a week! But finally this morning they fixed the line and we are back in cyberspace! Yea!
But wait... I forgot to tell you what happened Tuesday afternoon. It was nap time at the Rollins house and everything was quiet. All of a sudden I heard a strange noise coming from my closet. I hesitantly opened the door to see a steady stream of water coming through the ceiling from the attic!!! I quickly moved a few important things out of the way and began to mentally troubleshoot. Was it a roof leak? Nope... it's sunny outside. Oh NO!!! The hot water heater is very conveniently placed in our attic directly above my walk-in closet! So I called Dusty in a panic and asked what to do. I hung up with one task... turn off the water at the street. Luckily we have a water key from our building days so I got it out of the shed and ran to the street. Now, we live on a very busy 4-lane road so I had to wait until traffic passed to stick my head nearly in the road to reach down into the water meter. Well, I dug and dug through dirt and worms and what ever else was in there and could not find the shut off! Dusty was on his way home so I crawled into the attic to see what I could do there. That is when I realized the problem... the platform that the water heater was sitting on had given way and it was leaning to one side. It had broken the emergency drain connection in the mean time and was draining into our closet ceiling. At this point my knight in shining armor appeared! Dusty tipped the water heater up and I propped it up with a board which allowed us to connect a hose to drain it outside. All was well. Until... All of a sudden the whole connection broke and water came gushing out instead of the nice trickle and the ceiling came with it! So now we have a gaping hole in the closet ceiling with water pouring in all over everything in the closet. Dusty runs to the street to turn off the water and finally manages to do so but there was still 40+ gallons that had to drain. So bucket after bucket was filled until it finally stopped.
The good new is that, again from our building days, we have connections! Our plumber got here in 5 minutes and helped Dusty cap off the connections so we could turn the water back on. In the mean time I was able to get the kids fed and in bed. Then our next knight in shining armor came! Hugo and his wife came and helped us clean everything up! Hugo does everything at full speed so we had everything hauled out of the closet, water sucked up with the shop vac, carpet pulled out, padding thrown in the garbage, sheetrock pulled of the wall and ceiling, heaters going to dry out the wood, and all the contents of my closet strewn around the house by 9:00 PM! Dusty and I would have been there all night so we were very thankful for his help!!
As I am writing this the electrician has arrived to wire up the new water heater UNDER our house in the crawl space and the plumber is coming at noon to hook it all up! When we finally sat down to rest last night, we thanked God that this did not happen while we were gone over the weekend and that of all places, the closet was the best! We also realized that we have accumulated a bunch of junk so our close will be so much cleaner now! So today is looking much brighter!
(I was too depressed to take pictures of our huge mess so you will just have to imagine it! :o)
3 comments:
Yay! I'm glad you're back on! And that you survived without TOO much damage- what an ordeal!
What a great testament to Dusty's relationship with his employees that you got to go to the baptism of Hugo's daughter. Very cool! I missed you online- Keidi
We're glad to get an update, we just hate that it's one of such chaos! The worst part of it all, though, is that Dusty had to miss the Gator game ;) We're glad you're all doing well!
So, that's were you have been! I can't believe that happened1 It sounds like you handled it beautifully. What a blessing that Dusty was so close and his buddies were able to come and help!
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