jim_p

Yesterday, we got the very tiniest glimmer of a taste of what they must be going through in New Orleans...

When Tam and I moved from Worcester, we kept a lot of stuff in a climate-controlled storage warehouse. Tuesday the warehouse called and said "We've had water pooling on the floor near where your unit is, and by process of elimination it seems to be originating in your unit". Oh, joy. They offered to move our stuff to another unit on higher ground a different floor, but we figured we'd best oversee this ourselves.

In a way, the timing was fortunate. Tam was planning to come out to visit me that day, and

persis was scheduled to come to my place to do more of the organizing thing. Thanks to the miracle of cellular technology, we all managed to re-vector ourselves and converge on Worcester to take care of the deed.

Upon opening the storage unit, I wondered what the problem was. There was no obvious pooling of water anywhere near the entrance, and everything seemed dry. As we dug our way inside, though, we figured out what was going on. Apparently there was some kind of leakage, and it had pooled in one corner of our storage unit.

We pulled things out and moved them to the new space, carefully photographing anything that had a hint of mold or moisture damage on it. In the grand scheme of things, little was badly damaged. Still, there were some painful moments. The first couple of water-damaged boxes to emerge weren't much to cry over... dated computer documentation and Microsoft programming manuals. Quite expendable.

Then, a couple of boxes of old National Geographics emerged with some mold... these were pre-1950's issues. Waah! Still, they might be recoverable if dried out.

Then... the utter heartbreak. One box emerged that had been at the epicenter of the aquatic invasion. It was so wet and damaged, it was bursting. Upon opening it, I found... (*whimper*) my cookbooks. Several Poison Pen reprints (e.g. Apicius, medieval banquets), my Iron Chef book, several historical cookbooks... basically the 90% of my cookbook shelf that I'd consigned to storage since it wuldn't fit in my kitchen... only two books emerged from that box unscathed. The rest went from "spotted with mold" to "covered in so much furry mold they've merged into each other as one mass". Total loss.

We carefully photographed and inventoried everything in case we might get a pittance from insurance, but it still hurt. And the pervasive scent of mold in the air gave us a tiny glimpse of what the folks in New Orleans must be going through...