tattguy069

Time for an update!

Let's first go back a few weeks. Some of you may know about all of the rain we've had here in northeast PA recently. We had the equivilent of 4 months of rain in 4 days. Many homes and businesses in the surrounding areas were a complete loss. One guy I work with was forced to sleep in his car with his wife and kids in the wal-mart parking lot due to a manditory evacuation.

Here is a picture of the flooding from a few years ago due to hurricane Ivan (I suck and couldn't get out to get any new photos from the flood of '06). This same spot flooded this time as well only worse...this is about 1 mile down the road from my house. Notice the car roofs above the water line...


One of the things we looked at when shopping for a house was that it wasn't in a flood area. After going through that hurricane (we were lucky then too..nothing for us but 1/4 mile away was flooded out) we knew not to be anywhere near a river. This time around we got about half an inch of water in our basement which we spent diligently shop-vaccing it out every few hours.

We had a few friends over for the fouth of July weekend and just chilled out at the house. Karen and her new boyfriend drank with us..here is a partial shot of Karen...



You know those puppies came out!

We played strip pool, boys against the girls until one of the topless ladies had to quit. She was puking in the bathroom...maybe next time

This past weekend we went to upstate NY to visit with my family. A year ago, two of my cousins nearly burned to death in their home from faling asleep with a candle burning. They we 13 and 15 at the time. Both were at a little family "get together" that we had. The oldest girl has only two deformed fingers left on her right hand and is very badly disfigured but happy to be alive. The younger girl has bad burn scars on her arms and hands (picture freddy kruger) but is otherwise ok and takes everything with a grain of salt. Both girls sang karaoke which was great to see. As I was talking to my aunt (the mother of the two) she introduces me to her boyfriend. I recognize him as someone I went to high school with and had last seen 18 years ago. His words are slurred but he looks fine as he tells me about a near fatal car wreck he was in 3 years prior. Driving drunk and fighting with my aunt he accelerated to 105mph and rolled the car 4 times. She was thrown from the car on during the first revolution and walked away from the crash. He actually went through the roof of the car, his stomach went up through his diaphram and ended up above his lungs. He died twice on the way to the hospital and ended up with some minor brain damage. Small world and tragedy all around.

On a final note, there is a spider that builds an intricate web every night attached to the corner of our porch by the light fixture. He gets his food for the evening and dismantles the web by morning. I never knew spiders took down their webs every day...live and learn. Bonnie had a picture of thebug but I can't find it anywhere on the computer...ah well...here is a rainbow in our backyard after all of the damaging rain we had...