And I was just going to check to make sure my cat wasn't stuck out in the rain....

After supper tonight, I was sitting on the couch catching my breath after a fairly busy day. Matthijs was being a great husband and doing the dishes. There was supposed to be a barbecue going on with the neighbours, but I wasn't quite up to it. I was tired. And it'd started raining.

And then the electricity went out. Matthijs asked me if I was going to look into that (it hadn't really occurred to me to do so - in my world, electricity sometimes goes out if there's a storm and then after awhile it comes back on again - but the neighbours across the street had electricity, so that theory was probably faulty). Yet, I wasn't really feeling up to figuring out how to get the electricity back. I was, however, slightly worried that it'd been awhile since I'd seen the cat. And with the pouring rain, I'd feel bad if he'd gotten accidentally stuck outside.

So I went to check upstairs. The stairs were wet - so I closed the door to outside. And it was still wet - dripping through the walls and from the ceiling. It seemed pretty bad to me - so I got some towels and buckets. But no sign of the cat. So I went downstairs to look for him - and I'd heard somebody say something about water (I figured it was dripping through from above). Still no cat. But there was water pouring through the ceiling of the sports hall downstairs. And the kitchen was at least a foot under water.

So I figured we'd dump the water out into the alleyway - but as I went to the alleyway, I saw that it was also at least a foot underwater. I figured the gutter was blocked. The gutter was found - just full. Full like all of the drains in the kitchen and bathroom downstairs. So everyone in the house (and some from the party upstairs) bucketed the water in the alleyway and the kitchen into industrial size garbage pins (which got emptied into the canal). And after getting all wet and gross, the alleyway became empty of water - as did the kitchen - along with what we could reach of the "bruiloftzaal." And then I realized that our house next door also has an entire floor that's lower than our kitchen - and thus potentially full of water.

So somebody checks that out - and there are mops and rags needed to clean up that mess. And then we hear that the Kruispost is full of water. And as I go to get more rags and mop stuff, I see that the Kajuit and kitchen and the hallway leading to the back room is also full of water. Less than in our kitchen, but more than enough to keep us busy for at least an hour - emptying buckets of water, picking up wet books and papers from an office floor and getting sore hands out from so frequently rinsing out a rag.

Sometime in the first hour, I'd heard that my cat had run upstairs to its house - it had probably hid in the sports hall when it discovered the rain coming through the ceiling and the large puddle on the ground. But by the time I'd heard that, the search for the cat had moved to the back of my mind: trying to get rid of all that water and fix the disaster as quickly as possible had taken over all my attention - there was little room for any other thoughts - except a thankfulness for the willingness of so many people here to help out. And a sense of thankfulness that despite this being a lot of work to clean up, there seems to be little to no damage.