Ike flooded my basement and fixed my cable

We received the remnants of Hurricane Ike this morning in the form of a torrential downpour that lasted four hours and flooded our basement (for the third time this summer). 4.3 inches according to our local newscast.

(Some quick words of explanation- our city's "run-off" drainage system is inadequate because it was built long before our city got huge. So whenever there is a lot of rain in a short period of time, the drainage system works for a while, then gets too full and stops draining- thus the water running down the hill onto our porch runs right under our french doors and into our basement, instead of down the drain located on our porch. So there's really not much we can do about it...I know, Mom- sandbags.)


Here's a video that Jon shot as the water was seeping in. (In the video, he mentions that it was the fourth time we've had flooding- but it's really only the third.)

The floor is red painted concrete which I actually thought looked pretty cool until all this flooding has made the paint peeley and gross.

Here's more pics of the flooding: In the first one, you can see our sandbox turtle with two cinder blocks in front of it that are almost completely submerged.

In this second photo, you can see how high the water was in reference to the chair leg. We think there was about a foot of water up against our back door.
The goods news of the day is- for some reason our cable connection is now crystal clear after months of the picture on almost all channels getting worse and worse. This was after multiple visits from the cable guys who said there was nothing they could do to restore the picture. We couldn't even get two network channels (one of which is the station Oprah is on). But for some reason, this huge storm fixed the problem! Cool, right?