Gadzooks!

Happy Bastille Day!

I'm celebrating the occasion by finishing up The Scarlet Pimpernel.  Wait, what's that?  The Scarlet Pimpernel is anti-French and anti-revolution?  Oh yeah, that's true.  I guess I should be reading Les Mis.  Oh well, vive la Patrie nonetheless.

I also started out this day --which marks the downfall of les aristos and their Bastille fortress -- by learning of the downfall of my own battlement.  Or basement.

Freshly showered, in our work clothes and ready to start brown-bagging our lunches, Blake made a horrible discovery. 

Somewhere during the course of the storm last night (in which we had lost power and gained several additional degrees of heat, making sleep nearly impossible) our basement had flooded.

I thought he was playing some sort of cruel joke.  That sort of thing shouldn't happen twice in one year.

But alas it was no joke.  Again, I wanted to just have a breakdown and start crying, but I knew that more water still wouldn't help the situation.  The drain outside had filled with leaves and clay/soil due to the massive amount of water cascading down the stairs from the yard.  Perfect.  Dirty water.

And so we put our pajamas back on, rolled up our pant legs, tied back (in my case) our still-wet and straggly hair, and got out every towel we owned to start the drying process.  It made us late for work.  It also made us sweaty and grumpy.

It was raining on the way to work, so we added bedraggled and drippy to our sweaty and grumpy.  Again, perfect.

When I got to work I learned that we'd not have access to computers for two hours due to some technical problems.  It was just about this time that Blake e-mailed me to say that they were having a fire drill and he'd have to stand out in the rain for an hour.

Remind me why we even came into work today?

And, for some reason my computer won't give me access to our main database, which means I'm practically useless today.  Oh, and right before the internet was so unlovingly snatched from my office, Blake sent me an e-mail saying that somewhere in the course of the morning he'd gotten distracted (gee, wonder why?) and forgotten to brush his teeth.

Thank goodness for Altoids.

The fates are conspiring against us.