Annie, are you ok? Can you tell us, are you OK, Annie?

I AM OK!!

The Man, The Turd Herd and I are all ok.
The house is in rough shape.
We got 4 feet of backwater (sewage, backflow, the poop, turd soup, whatevs). Everything in my basement is a loss, again. The water was higher than in 2008. And way way way more unpleasant. In the past we have had largely clear water with slight funk. This was...so not clear. This was viscous and dark grey brown. I could not see even 8 inches into the water. *gag*
But it's down to bare, shit smeared floor now.

Here is how it went down for me, and I tell you, for being agoraphobia girl, I picked a HELL of a time to be out and about. Ugh. I wanted to make an afghan. No, NEED to make one. I have a vision. So yesterday afternoon when the man got home from work we headed out to Michael's for some acrylic yarn (since I know my cats and no WAY am I not having this be idiot proof to launder it) I found the colors i wanted. We went to pay and holy hell, the sky was just about pitch black. Some little shit in front of us started screaming he could see a tornado. I wanted to just pinch him. He did NOT see a tornado, but there I was stuck 5 miles from home to see this bearing down on us and I knew. I KNEW it was going to be ugly. And then the rain began. And it was honestly unlike anything I had ever seen before. We were trapped in the craft store. When we were finally able to leave it took us 2.5 hours to travel 5 miles. We simply could not get home. Every southbound street was flooded, cars were submerged and floating. Disabled cars were everywhere.
The rain would stop and then just be coming down in sheets again.
We drove through neighborhoods where the water was just gushing up from the sewers, saw manhole covers missing, saw houses flooding up to their front doors. I was shaking so hard from panic that I ached this morning like I had aerobicized like it was 1987. My elbow joints were just on fire all night long from shaking. Who knew?

We finally found a place to get gas and the man at the next pump spoke to my husband, we found out if we went much further west we could get south. They shook hands and wished each other well and we left. Well, we detoured to Yen Ching so I could pee someplace nicer than a gas station. And they were gracious about us rushing in just for that, we will have to order from there this week! Anyway, so homeward bound.
We knew it was going to be bad. We knew. We tried to brace ourselves for it.
We weren't even sure if we were going to be able to get into our area once we got south, but we tried it and our street was not very bad. But when we got out of the car we could hear the water alarm blaring and it was just a matter of seeing how bad it was going to be, and I was hoping against hope that none of my basement walls had caved in.
So we saw it was high, very high. And the power was still on (amazing given the number of downed lines and people who LOST power. If ever there was a time to lose it, it was last night!) and I had things plugged in down there. And all of that water had come up FAST so I just didn't know if it was going to stop at 4 feet. We called the power company and got in queue for an emergency disconnect as the danger of the house catching fire was pretty serious. We realized we could not stay there and I called La Quinta and they were slammed with people in our situation, so I hopped online and made a reservation (crafty!) for us and after checking back and making sure the disconnect could occur without us being home, we left a sign on the door saying where to find our meters and left.
The plan was to check in and come back to wait. But when we got here and checked the news, the city of Milwaukee was asking people to stay off the streets because of the sinkholes (!!!!!) and all the missing manhole covers. We made the hard choice to stay put.
This morning was a very tense ride home to see if we had a house left at all, and if the cats made it. We did and they were all OK. Even Hellvis. The water was a smidge higher, but had drained completely by 3 pm and we were finally able to see our walls were intact.

We are still without power and will be until Monday at the earliest. We have to have an HVAC contractor come out and disconnect the electrical from the furnace and sign an affidavit from the city and THEN and only then can We Energies come out and reconnect us. Consolidated Heating and AC will be there Monday morning, first available appointment. We can't clean anything up until we have power, so it's going to be grim.
My house smells like a hot turd.
All of my neighbors flooded with the poop. Someone down the street had a cave-in. A few more blocks away a whole neighborhood was evacuated do to multiple cave-ins.
There are piles of ruined junk heaped all up and down my street. People up on hills also flooded. I also had 2 feet of standing water in the back yard this morning, the low part. I thought 2008 was the worst I had ever seen. Today was worse. More widespread. The air just smells of sewage everywhere.

But, we are still OK. We're going to be broke as a joke, but we're OK.
I will try to not accost any elderly Asian couples this time around, pinkie swear.