I woke up on sunday morning to the excited cries of my six-year old son: “There’s a lake in our backyard!”. I wasn’t too worried about it. Sometimes when it rains a lot we get a couple of puddles of water in the back and the kids call it a “lake”. A nasty storm had passed through the night before and it had been raining heavily all night so I assumed the puddles had appeared again.

But when he came running into my room screaming, “The lake comes all the way up to our house” I started to worry. I asked him if he had looked in the basement. He looked down the stairs then came back to report that the basement looked like a place where the creature from the black lagoon would live. That didn’t sound good…

I went down to check it out for myself. The first thing I noticed was one of my guitars gently floating by near the bottom of the steps. Things were getting steadily worse.

I had nearly a foot of water in my basement. That is especially bad news since I keep ALL of my guitars in the basement. I built a little closet to hold them about six inches off of the ground. But that wasn’t enough to keep them safe.

I brought all of my guitars upstairs and dried them off. The Taylor 414 and the Les Paul Standard that you see me playing in the videos on myOnlineGuitar were among them. I held the hollow instruments over the sink and let the water pour out of the sound hole. Then I set them out to dry and headed back down.

My next concern was my recording studio. Between research, contruction and equipping the room, it took me about two years to complete. Having a high-quality home studio had been a dream of mine for years. Finally, in 2007 I had completed it.

But in 2009, it was destroyed.

At least partially. I lost some important equipment. The nearly-soundproof walls which I was so proud of had been damaged. All the wood laminate flooring and subfloor had been destroyed. My Marshall half-stack, my Fender Blues Deville amp and my Pro Tools PC were all partially submerged. They still need to dry out some more before I’m going to turn them on to see if they still work.

There is a whole list of other things that were destroyed but it hurts the most to see my instruments and music equipment in such bad shape.

To top it off, my insurance company is paying me nothing for my claim. Because this was a flood and not a sump-pump backup they will not pay me anything. Ouch.

All in all it hasn’t been such a bad couple of days. My two little boys are safe and they had a great time playing in our new lake. I decided that instead of dwelling on everything that I had lost it was better to be happy that I had two little boys out there having the time of their lives. After all, it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to go swimming in your back yard.

I hope…