New Name New Blog

Time to retire The Single Sister. I've set up a new blog over at wordpress.

Project {Pearson}

Our life seems to be one project after another. Come check out what we've been doing to our house and other things happening in our lives.

Names that just won't be.

Ever hear a baby name and think awwww, that's a cute one. Then combine it with your last name (or future last name in my case) and giggle? Here is a list of names that make me giggle.

Paisley Pearson

Parsons Pearson

Posey Pearson

The more I think about a baby girl name Paisley, the more I like it. Maybe that's just because I know it just won't be with a last name Pearson.

New Blog

Here it is, my wedding blog. Not sure what kind of stuff you'll find on this new blog of mine. But either way it will be all wedding. :)

thesinglesistergetsmarried.blogspot.com

We'll see if I'm any better at updating this one.

What happened next...

Wednesday after the big engagement I went to bed with visions of milk glass vases, pink and orange flowers, and wedding dresses dancing through my head. It had rained all afternoon and Mark had brought up the radar on his phone and said, "Hey look at this, this storm is going to track over us all night and not move." "Oh wow," was my response, eager to get back to thinking about my future wedding dress.

And we slept. And it kept raining. I mean it really rained. Like 100 year flood rain. Epic Rain.

We woke up the next morning, not realizing anything was out of sorts. Mark left for work while I was in the shower and called when he got to the freeway. "Say, you should check the basement. I noticed they were pumping water from the sewer on our street."

I ran down to the basement to find wet carpet, wet cement, wet everything. Is it coming in from the walls? No, from our floor drain. Storm water had pushed its way up through our floor drain. Great. At some point in the night we had enough water to at least cover every inch of our basement floor, we still aren't sure how high it got that night but it had receded and was only pooling up an inch around our floor drain by morning.

Call Mark, come home we have water.

Call Dad, ummm how do we get water out of our basement?

Call insurance, we have water.

Call rental company in town, do you have any portable sump pumps? Stop laughing, really do you? No?

Call rental company #2 in town, do you have any portable sump pumps? 1 left? Hold it, I'm on my way.

30 min later I come home (with the last portable sump pump in town) to find this:

What was just a wet floor when I left the house was now 3 inches of storm water over our entire basement, both finished and unfinished parts. Our sump pump that we have is now running like crazy, pumping water out from one side of our house, we get the other pump set up and ran the hose up the stairs and out the door on the other side of the house and Mark started bailing water out by the bucket full. It was like bailing water out of the Titanic, no progress was being made, but we felt like we were at least trying to do something. At the highest, we measured 7 inches of water in our basement. Even with the pumps going, it just kept coming in from the floor drain.

Here are some pictures we took for insurance. At this point the water was still rising.

We started to grab the electronics to get them out of the way of the rising water. But when we picked up the BluRay player (which is on the second shelf) it was water logged. We have a feeling that the water had been much higher in the middle of the night. The only thing we managed to save from the basement was the TV. And Ruby, luckily she was up on a couple of tables so we didn't have to find out how long a hedgehog can tread water.

This is the floor drain that was the cause of all the trouble. And our washer and dryer that had to go bye-bye. That black stuff you see on the floor? I swear our floor wasn't that dirty, thats dirt from the storm water coming in. Ewwww. Finally around 2:00 the drain started acting like a drain and not a geyser and the water went away fairly quickly.

I don't remember how many inches of rain Owatonna saw in those couple of days. Hundreds of homes were effected, dozens were lost, some business were forced to relocate. Roads were closed. I hadn't thought of it before but there are only 3 ways to get across town: Hoffman, Bridge St., and Hwy 14. Hoffman was closed, completely covered in water. Bridge St. went across the flooded river. When I went to work Friday morning the water was still rising and had covered the bridge. They were letting 1 line of cars cross at a time. Police and national guard were everywhere. "Center of the car over the center of the line!" was all you heard over the rain drops and sloshing water under your car. Not many people considered the 3rd option, Hwy 14, it was Friday and it had been closing for construction every weekend. Thankfully they kept it open, it was my only guaranteed way home from work that night!

Here is an arial shot of part of a flooded owatonna.

Thankfully after the drain started working on Thursday, we didn't have anymore water in our basement. And an equally big sigh of relief, we had opted for the higher sewer back up insurance plan. We were going to be covered by insurance, let the cleanup begin.

Water mitigation came in and tore up the carpet, treated everything, and put air movers and huge dehumidifiers all over the basement. We finally got our hot water heater going again by Monday and were able to take hot showers. We also had to get a new furnace and were able to get that installed before it got too cold. New carpet and a front loading washer and drier came shortly after.

It's now January, and we still have some cleanup tasks: redo the insulation in the finished part of the basement, put paneling back up (cleanup guys treated it and said it was still okay to use), and get some new doors for the basement. You can clearly see the water line in the white door. We are still not sure what the future is for the basement, we had it set up as a home theater, but I'm a little nervous to do this again. Maybe after the spring we can see how it goes and if we have any close calls.

If it had to happen it couldn't have happened at a better time. We had the ring paid off, we still had some cushion in savings from the house credit to use to pay for those big ticket items before insurance reimbursed us, and we weren't in big time wedding planning mode. It was definitely a test in our ability to stay sane in a mini-crisis. I'd say Mark and I passed.

The Engagement

I've picked this post up a couple of times, tried to put what has happened in the last...oh...4 months into words. It fails me every time. So here I am, hoping that Brooke will sleep for just a few minutes longer so I can possibly finish this post once and for all!

I know posting has been pretty scarce over here at The Single Sister. I know you all know things have been happening over here at The B&P household. Some of it has been fun, some exciting, some downright miserable. All of it blog material, but it doesn't leave me a lot of time to actually blog about it.

The #1 news at The B&P household. The news that will force me to come up with a new blog title? The news that I'v been doing a horrible job at keeping a secret? Mara put it best, "Worst kept secret ever!"

I'm WE are engaged!

Yeah, I know, none of you are surprised. But that doesn't put a damper on the excitement, right?!? And everyone reading this probably already knows. This is big. I mean, I'm going to have to change my blog name, big. ;) I'm going to have a husband. Big. I'm going to have a step-daughter. Big. Wow, that just sounds weird. Step-daughter. I'll have to process that one later.

When did this happen? Oh, like 4 months ago. Why has it taken me so long to update? I'm lazy. I can no longer use the wait-till-you-see-what-happened-next excuse. Life just gets in the way sometimes. Want the how-did-he-do-it-? story? Here it is:

I knew, I've known for over a year. I knew right away that I wanted to marry this man. We half jokingly, half not so jokingly, had our wedding date picked out in the first week or so that we were together. Ok, so it really did start out as a joke but in the months to come we realized it wasn't a joke anymore, that we wanted it to be reality.

Over the last 6 years or so every time I imagined how I would become engaged for some reason I pictured it being a complete surprise to me. I imagined dating a guy for a year or so, most likely living with him, and having him surprise me with a ring. "What? I didn't know this was coming!"

Yeah, right. Why I thought this fit my personality, I'll never know. I guess thats how I saw it played out on TV and in the movies. I'm more of a take charge kind of gal. I want to know what's coming and when its coming. I wanted to find the one, get married, and have kids. Of course I'm going to know when I meet the one, and I'm probably not going to sit around and wait and see if he feels the same. :)

A month or so into our relationship we started talking about rings; ring styles, colors, sizes, etc. Talking about it turned into internet searches to explain the styles I liked. The concept of halos and emerald cut baguettes were new to him. No Mark, a baguette isn't a crusty loaf of french bread. ;)

Looking online turned to wanting to see the styles in person. The first time we looked was on our trip to Duluth. That trip turned into more trips, a quest to make sure we found the right one. By Thanksgiving I had told my family. By December we put a setting on layaway in hopes that we would have the whole thing paid off by the next fall. I had told Mark early on that I wanted to have been together for at least a year before we were technically engaged. Formality, I guess.

January we took a trip to the wedding fair to see if our dreams of a New Years Eve wedding in 2011 would be possible. Would venues fill up quickly with holiday parties and weddings? Would prices be too expensive since it's a holiday? Things were looking good. Now to just pay off that ring, still keeping that Fall time frame in mind. I always wanted to be able to announce my engagement at one of the family crafting weekends we have in Wisconsin.

Mark kept asking me if it was ok with me that I knew it was coming, concerned that I would feel like I missed out on the big surprise. To me finding Mark was the big surprise, I knew I wanted to marry him. Now I just wanted everyone else to know.

In May we had the opportunity to buy a house, does this make sense? Should we keep renting to save money for the ring and the wedding? We went for it, best decision ever, even after what happened a few days after our engagement...

Ok, so finally the engagement. I knew when the ring would be paid off. I had us on a pretty tight budget to get it paid off. I wanted that ring dam-it! LoL

For a couple of days after I knew that it was paid off, I would frisk Mark as he walked in the door, looking for a ring box, trying to figure out if he would have had time to run up to Shane Co after work. On Tuesday the 21st of September he proposed to me, on one knee, in our living room.

I knew it was coming, I knew the ring by heart, and it was still perfect.