The Score, So Far.

Well, the Man Moat is not a moat any longer, but it sure feels naked without anything in it. We decided to toss all the carpet in there and the fancy title stuff didn't seem worth putting back down as it would need to get pulled again if we had another flood.

I have about 80 some odd records with covers that are in various states of disarray. I think the actual records are going to be ok, but the covers are pretty trashed. Among the losses were titles by James Brown, John Coltrane, Sunn0))), Jesu, Albert Alyer and Ornette Coleman.

Because I needed to pull some files off my laptop and decided I had nothing to lose, I just checked out one of my drives. This one was a little USB drive that was completely submerged and discovered on the other side of the room from where I left it. It worked fine. This gives me hope for the other drives, though my backup drive that didn't get flooded decided to work finally and I have early April images if need be.

The computers themselves are still untested. I'm not feeling that brave yet. I'm also unsure about a handful of power supplies and a fancy schmancy Monster power strip which were completely submerged.

My Grestch bass drum seems to have dried out fine and obviously the Vistalites are ok.

That's pretty much it right now.

Man Lair, Flooded.

I am a very sad panda this morning. After valiantly fighting torrents of rain on several occasions, the elements finally caught up with us last night while we were sleeping. Ironically, I'd been checking the flood situation all through the day and was lulled into thinking everything was ok.

When I went into the basement this morning (ironically to try and coax a backup image out of my submerged Windows XP machine that was giving me headaches yesterday,) the carpet squished. I looked over at a copy of Gato Barberi's Chapeter One I'd just bought two days prior and noticed the bottom corner of the gatefold was sticking out at a 90 degree angle, throughly saturated. The entire basement had flooded.

Before when we'd had problems, it was just isolated to a small area. Judging by the waterline on my PC, we got about three inches all the way to the back wall last night. Several things floated away from where they were, waiting to be found in corners were I hadn't put them.

The good news/bad news is that most of what I had was off the floor. The bad news is that I now have a crate of records throughly waterlogged.

So far, that seems to be the biggest loss, though I have two computers whose conditions are as yet unknown. The bass drum from my vintage Grestch kit got a bit damp as did the amber Vistalite bass drum, which is at least the second time that poor drum went in the drink.

Anyway, I'm a bit numb at the moment. It could have been much worse, and it still might be. I guess I'm hoping at least I can salvage the drives from the computer and maybe insurance will cover some of the records. I hope.