Flooded Basement AGAIN!

Unbelievable. We had freakishly warm weather yesterday. It broke records. In was in the upper 60's, in January, in Illinois. We were warmer in Chicagoland than Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Did I mention it's January? Anyway, the freakish weather brought lots of rain last night, and very violent weather traveling through the Midwest. There were a lot of tornado reports. Well, thank goodness we didn't have a threat from a tornado. We just had a bad thunderstorm. I'm pretty sure it rained all night. Sometime in the middle of the night, the sump pump stopped working. We didn't lose electricity. The sump pump broke. Couldn't have predicted that! Our basement has water in it. Again. We just did this. Unbelievable. My oldest daughter and I get up at 5 a.m. as usual, we let the dog out, and then I decided to check on the basement. I will usually do that when we've had as much rain as we had overnight. I open the door, turn on the lights, and a BIG swear word flies out of my mouth. I was just shocked. About an inch of water in the basement. I had to walk down there to see why, to see if it was in fact the sump pump. It was. Calling a plumber at 5 a.m. is an emergency call. You pay extra for that. A plumber (a VERY nice man, by the way) comes within the hour, installs the new sump pump, and it is now pumping away. I need to give it time to work, and then I have to go dry stuff off and see what I need to throw out. I just did this. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again. Plus, to top it all off, my husband is out of town on business. You know, misery loves company. I could use another person over here. Darn, I should have made the girls stay home from school just so I would have someone to listen to my complaints. Poor Princess, she's going to have to listen to it all today. (Believe me, I know that some water in the basement is a minor inconvenience, and it doesn't even compare to some of the horrendous weather problems / situations that others have had to deal with. I watched a lot of tornado coverage this morning on the news. I'm mildly complaining, and I do know that things could be much worse.)

Well, since I'm just waiting for the sump pump to do its thing, I'll at least post my welded Cricut images. Why not? I downloaded only the trial version. Because I have just the Cricut, I can use only George to try out the trial version.


I welded my name together, and then I welded the word "Love" and I welded a heart to that image. Pretty cool. This would be nice for scrapbook page titles. Instead of putting down individual letters, one welded strip could be put down on the page.


On these two, I welded together a bunch of circles, and then a bunch of flowers. Once again, pretty cool. The circles could be used as a scallop edge. The flowers could be used as a border on a page or a card.

Here, I just covered half of the circles to show you how it could be attached as a scallop edge. I do like this idea.

So, what did I think of the Design Studio? I like the idea, and I think it's something I would eventually purchase, but I won't get it for a while. I really don't have a need for it right now. I definitely think if you have the Expression, this would be an awesome tool to have. My other problem is that my computer and my Cricut are on two different levels of the house. My scrap area is upstairs, and my computer is downstairs in the family room. That won't be changing, so if I want to use Design Studio, I would have to move my Cricut downstairs every single time I wanted to use it. We'll see. Cool program, but probably not something I will be purchasing right away.

Thanks for stopping by! You know where I'll be. Yep, in the basement.