And so this doesn't turn into a novel, which I'm sure I could develop, we'll use some bullet points.
-August, Ken gets a new job! Well, not just a "new" job, but another job. He already runs 3 businesses. Two computer businesses and one mountain bike parts company. Not to mention he has been a real estate agent for around 2 years. (Here's Mr. Realtor Ken!) Now he has a full time job working for a client in Glenview he's been doing IT work for, for more than 10 years now! I'm glad he's able to work with people that
are like family. And they do pizza day every Friday! Obv I'm jealous. I love pizza.-Late August Lindsay, my older sister turned the big 25! Yes Quarter Century! She has a lot to be happy for though cus she's accomplished more in the first 25 years of her life than most people. Here's a cute pic of her. For her big day, I took the day off work, and our other lil sister Julie, who goes to college in Madison, Wisconsin, came down and we all went to the hors
e races at Arlington! (Here's a cute pic of her, she's in the middle) We got the box seats which was delightful, and had fun making little bets on horses we knew practically nothing about! Good times. I think I just about broke even. After a long day of horses, we went to a nice Italian restaurant with some of Lindsay's friends. It was a lovely day (Here she is blowing out her candle and us at the track)!
-Soon enough September rolled around and boy did things start to go south. For starters
the weather for the first 2 weeks was non stop rain rain rain and clouds clouds clouds. Not to mention temperatures in the 60's. It was so frustrating! It didn't feel like my birthday season at all. I'm used to 80's and sunny. But I guess it was well needed after being so dry for 3 months!
Note: The following pictures were not taken by myself, they are from other peoples documentations I found of the flood, I still have to upload my pics!
The worst of it was definately the weekend before my birthday. That being the 12th-14th. The remnants of Hurricane Ike decided to beeline straight across the Midwest through the Chicago metro area for 3 days straight! And living less than a mile from the notorious-for-flooding-Des Plaines River, we sure had quite a time. (Here's a pic of an uprooted tree in the town over, and then down town Des Plaines).
Stranded is a good word to describe it! 75% of roads were completely covered, and the water up to 2 feet high in some parts of our neighborhood (Here's some pics of down the street from our house). We couldn't drive an-y-where. One day Ken and I attempted to go groce
ry shopping for which the commute normally takes 15 minutes. It definately took over an hour because so many roads were blocked off we had to find our own detours. It was madness! Everyone was going crazy. Cars were floating in parking lots, and occasionally the road when 
attempting to drive through water that ended up being too high. Luckily we had Ken's super Tacoma! My sedan would have never survived. Not everyone was so lucky. :( I even heard that about a mile into Chicago people were being rescued from their houses by boat. Who knew a hurricane thousands of miles away 
would still have enough power to attack the midwest.Believe it or not, the roads weren't even the worst of it. Keyword..... basements! :-/
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Quick tangent:
Last summer, I think it was during July, Des Plaines had another 2-3 day downpour that resulted in massive power losses. Its never really just the rain that worries us, it's always the power loss. Because as soon as we lose the power to work our sump pump, the water in it starts to rise. And when it gets high enough (this happens for many people), it starts to overflow into the basement. So you can imagine what happened with the "massive power loss".
Think 3 straight hours of bucketing water up the basement stairs and down the driveway to save our belongings. In the pitch dark none the less! I had come home from work to hear Ken yelling to me from the basement "HELP ME MOVE THIS WATER!" So from then until 9pm, when a neighbor was able to get a generator that we could connect ourselves to, we filled about 200-300 gallons of water out of our house (no exaggeration). If we hadn't been working non stop, we would have seen lots of damage. Luckily, the hard work paid off and it was kept to a minimum.
Of course, using a neighbors generator couldn't go on all night. So meanwhile Ken's mother was waiting until 1 am in a huge line of desperate home owners at Home Depot for a truck shipment of $600.00 generators to come in. Luckily she was early enough in line to get one, and brough it to us later that night so that we didn't have to worry about the water coming in again. On a stress level scale, I think we'd all agree that was about a 9.
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And now come back to 2 weeks ago.
(Downtown Des Plains Pic)We still had power. So as long as that continued, we still had a working sump pump.
I warned Ken on the 2nd straight day of rain that we might want to go to his parents house and pick up the generator from last year, just in case the power were to go out, and before the road waters go so high that there was no way to commute between towns. Also, because at that point, the pump was going on every 2 minutes. So if we lost power, we'd be in about 5 inches of water in less than a half hour. But there was no lightening, and no more wind, so Ken saw no reason that the power would go out.
(Here's the forest preserve picnic area)
Well come the next morning, you bet, for one reason or another, it went out.Within 15 minutes, the water was coming into the basement, and Ken was screaming for my help to bucket the water out of the house, which was coming about double as fast as last year.
Instead, I got in my lil car, and tried to find a way to the next town over where Ken's parents live to help his dad get the 200lb generator into their suburban because his mom wasn't home. Our neighbors had warned there was no possible way to get between Des Plaines and Park Ridge, but I didn't really take that as an answer. I found a way over there, and we were able to get the generator back and working within an hour. And just in the nick of time because the water was about to reach a crucial point.
On a stress scale, I'd say this was about an 8.
But again, we were lucky. A lot of our neighbors basements got ruined that weekend. And not just our neighbors, but houses for miles and miles (Here's a pic of the entrance to the college I went to).
My birthday was the next day (which ended up being miserable of course) and it was also trash day, not to mention the first day of the stock market crash! With most of the roads still flooded, I found my way to the train station to go to work, and on the way home (which took about an hour longer than normal), I saw that house after house after house had piles of belongings, some 5 feet high, out on their driveways to be taken away. And it was like that for a week straight afterward. I feel blessed that we didn't lose anything.
I guess there's no way to write that story in a bullet point. lol.
Moving on...
-About a week after I turned 24, the September weather was back to normal, and Kens new job was sending him to the UK for a week for training in Manchester. Although he did manage to spend a day to himself in London. I held down the fort while he was gone and spent a good amount of down time watching this show:
because I'd never seen it before, thanks to a suggestion from one of my best friends Colleen who says it's one of her guilty pleasures. And now I definately can see why! That's the kind of thing you can only do when your boyfriend is gone on vacation.The rest of the time I did a lot of hooping to new music, cleaning, dog walking, and skype video talking with Ken on my new laptop. But I was glad to finally have him home on the 25th.
Unfortunately for him, its not a week later and he has already found himself in the middle of a horrible cold. I'm going to assume it had to do with a mixture of jet lag, time adjustment, and flight germs. Yuck. I'm making sure to take all my daily supplements so I don't catch it! This morning I made an extra antioxidant smoothie cus his cold is getting pretty bad. I'm hoping he can get it cleared out by this weekend.
We have a date on Friday! Quality K & K time.
One of my favorite groups, Pendulum is coming from the UK to the House of Blues. This doesn't happen often and I've never seen them live. I'm very excited!
Well, I'm out of time for now. Will post again soon. :)
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