I need to stop wishing for things; they never turn out the way I expect. Remember when I
wanted a brief, preemptive respite from the craziness of life with a newborn? My wish came true! I rested up while qualified nurses took over the bulk of the baby care because Cuatro was
stuck in the NICU for four days struggling to regulate her blood sugar. Nice. And remember a few days ago, when I felt
so stressed out? I just wanted it all to go away! Well, it did -- all but one stressor, which grew and grew and gobbled up the rest.
*SIGH.*
Let's begin our story a little earlier:
We have had crazy weather in the past week or so. [
Note: I began writing this blog post the day after Easter. I am a slow writer. Forgive me.] Last Tuesday, a storm knocked a large tree limb onto the roof of our front porch; the thump of it cracked the support column at the top and bottom:
April 19, 2011 at 11:30pm (about two hours after the limb fell), just before DH and his uncle dragged it off the porch roof.
The limb on the ground the next morning. It came from that tree on the left, so you can see how the wind must have torqued it.
The cracked column (it's cracked at the top, too, but I couldn't get a decent shot of that). It doesn't look like much, but it's enough to destabilize the column so we're going to have it removed, repaired, and put back. $$$! Thank goodness for insurance.
We had a close call around the side of the house (with a tree that we meant to have removed last summer, but never got around to it). A few inches to the East and this thing would have come crashing through the beautiful dining room windows instead of landing softly on the bushes.
Eeek!
DH heard the tree hit the house, but I didn't; I was already in the basement with the girls and our flashlights. (I always miss the dramatic stuff. In 2003, DH stood in the parking lot of our Kansas City apartment watching the F4 tornado approach until debris started to hit; I had been clutching my baby in the basement hallway well before the funnel crested over the hill, so I didn't see it.) Uno and Dos, who'd had to be roused from sleep to head down to our safe place, were very nervous about the storm -- and about being in a basement notorious for its jumping spiders (though, to be honest, the threat of jumping spiders may have been exaggerated to keep them out of my one good place to hide presents). Tres, on the other hand, had the situation under control:
"Listen guys," my 3yo said to her 6- and 8yo sisters, gesturing firmly with both hands. "This is not the time to panic! We're going to be okay. NOBODY PANIC!"
And she was right. Mostly. Except that we
did see a spider (regular, not jumping, but BIG). DH had joined us by then, though, so he stomped it to death and we all survived to tell the tale.
We went without power for a full day, which made me realize how unprepared we are for any real kind of disaster. But then life got back to normal ... for a day. Are we keeping track?
Tuesday: Violent (though non-tornadic,
sis!) thunder & wind storm
Wednesday: Calm and dry, but no power until late in the evening
Thursday: Beautiful!
Friday: More thunderstorms roll in
Saturday: Crazy-heavy, pouring-down rain all day long; beginning to feel the pressure of my responsibilities; blog an
overwhelmed blog post
So when we last left off, I had a lot on my mind -- hosting a holiday dinner at my house; keeping the children safe (from each other mostly) while DH worked until 8pm; writing a 10- to 15-minute talk about Christ's Atonement (you know, a nice light subject!); figuring out how to be musical.... Oh, and one more! Keeping the basement from flooding!
Our 108yo house has what is called a "wet basement." That just sounds like a bad idea, frankly, but it's not a finished (or even finishable) space meant for living in, so I guess it's okay. Apparently the builders anticipated that water would seep up from the ground into the foundation occasionally, so they sloped the floor ever-so slightly -- not enough that you'd notice, but enough to direct the stream toward a concrete trench called a French drain that then empties through a pipe out of the house toward the street.
Normally it works just fine. When it rains enough that the groundwater rises up through the foundation, a small but continuous trickle of water will run through the well-worn trench and out. But we don't usually get this much rain; our town's average precipitation during the wettest month of the year is 4.98 inches. During the week of April 19th through the 26th -- from the Tuesday of that wind storm to the Tuesday just after Easter -- we had
12.5 inches of rain, and most of that came over the weekend.
It rained all day Saturday -- sometimes a misty drizzle, sometimes fat, fast raindrops. I went downstairs every couple of hours to check the basement, and every time I did I'd find the trench overflowing and the water creeping up toward the cardboard boxes and Christmas decorations we have stored there. I'd turn on the WetVac again, quickly fill it with 16 gallons of rain water, empty that into three 5-gallon buckets (eh, who cares about that last gallon!), haul a bucket on each arm up the stairs of the old coal chute (more spidery, but shorter than the stairs to the back door on the main level), dump the buckets in the back yard where it slopes toward the street, come back for the third bucket, haul it to the yard, dump it, then come back to fill the WetVac -- rinse and repeat -- until I had caught up with the water and it was back to a small stream in the trench again.
Was that a run-on sentence? Because that's what my life began to feel like Saturday night: DH came home shortly after I put the kids to bed; we did the basement routine together, then I sat down to brainstorm for the Easter talk I would give in church the next day. I figured I had about an hour or so before the water in the basement reached critical levels -- enough time to gather sources or figure out a rough outline of what I wanted to say, then back to the grindstone, then back to writing. But DH went down earlier and found that the water had already risen dangerously high. We slurped and dumped, slurped and dumped until it looked like we were ahead of things, then resolved to check back in 30 minutes rather than an hour. 30 minutes later, though, the situation looked even more bleak.
I thought we'd be up very late: 2 or 3am, maybe, and then the rain would let up and we'd catch up with all the water. Or, I thought, maybe we can take it in shifts: I'll stay up half the night while DH sleeps, then I can sleep (or write my talk) while he works to keep the basement dry(ish) until morning. Except that we never caught up; the rain never stopped; it never even slowed down enough to become a one-person job.
The two of us worked literally all night, hard physical labor. Not all night in the sense of, "wow, that felt like a long time and kept us up late!" There was not a moment when we were not awake, vacuuming up water with the WetVac, filling buckets, dumping buckets, water lapping our ankles at every step. I did take a short break some time during the night to pop 4 Advils with a Dr. Pepper chaser. DH left me to fend for myself briefly while he tried to hunt down a plumber's snake (not an easy item to come by at 2am on Easter Sunday, for some reason, though he finally rustled one up from his parents' house). He snaked the drain to no avail: the rain kept coming; the water kept backing up; we had to keep working.
Trivia item of the day: Five gallons of water weighs (depending on the weight of the bucket) between 45-50 lbs. For hours, I carried one five-gallon bucket of water on each arm, then dumped them and returned for another five gallons. Over and over and over. I felt sore for days afterward.
It seems insane now, looking back, that we kept at it for so long. We did have several conversations throughout the night about how much it might cost to call a professional out to the house in the middle of the night. On a weekend. Over a holiday. If the problem had escalated earlier, we might have called someone -- but it had been manageable (annoying, but manageable) all during daylight; I'd only had to do the Slurp & Dump every couple of hours. The flooding only became critical around 10:30 or 11pm, and at that point we didn't know that it would stay that bad until morning. We thought it would stop raining. We didn't know what we'd gotten ourselves into until it was much too late.
Eventually, the rain did stop. By 7am, blue skies began to peek through the clouds. I kept at it (feeling like a zombie by then, tired beyond any sensation or ability to think) while DH went to get help from our across-the-street neighbor. When they and FIL came back over, I quit and let the men folk (or rather, the more well rested folk) take over.
Back to my list of stresses: The talk. Teaching music to the kids. Hosting a holiday dinner.... The stress of a flooded basement eclipsed everything else; I knew I couldn't possibly speak in church -- I had nothing prepared, no brain left to throw something together, and I'm not the sort who can speak off the cuff. DH, on the other hand, can and he (who is also more accustomed, thanks to his job, to staying up all night) graciously volunteered to speak in my place. I passed the music duties on to one of my counselors (though I found out later that she didn't get my message before church, so I probably stressed her out plenty -- oops!). I dramatically lowered my expectations of elegance for the Easter dinner.
I didn't even make it to church, which made me sad. But although DH, FIL and the neighbor had by that time jerry-rigged a sump pump to sit in the French drain, its float sat too high to trigger the pumping mechanism without a lot of water (and a lot of water is what we'd been trying to avoid all night!) so I stayed home to (a) babysit the pump -- forcing the float up as necessary -- and (b) try to figure out if I could get it to trigger earlier (never did figure that out). Besides, I thought it would be weird to show up to church, with my name on the program as a speaker, and then not speak. And if I sat down for any length of time (in the car or in a pew) I wasn't sure if I'd wake up for days. So I stayed home with the baby and puttered around.
Our adventure ended happily: The neighbor who helped rig up the sump pump came back in the afternoon, after his family's Easter festivities, with an industrial-sized snake. That didn't work, so he (who is not a plumber -- I have no idea where he got all this stuff) came back a little while later with a huge roto-rooter. He, FIL, DH, and DH's cousin (who had come for Easter dinner and gotten more than he bargained for, oops) worked at that for an hour or so at the street end of the drain until they pulled out a massive tangle of tree roots and debris that had kept the pipe clogged. Finally, the water stopped backing up in our basement and flowed freely again. We have had plenty of rain since then (PLENTY!) but no more problems with the French drain.
*PHEW.*
Though I still think we need to have a professional drill a hole in our basement floor to install the sump pump correctly. Just in case there's a next time.
Which there had better not be.
Anyway, yeah: That's what I get for wishing that all my problems could go away. Most of them did, just not in the way I expected. :-P
Fun fact: According to Weather.com, our town averages 4.64" of precipitation in the month of April. According to the local TV weather man (whom I emailed for the purposes of this blog), our town received 17.16" during April 2011.
Crazy.
~RCH~
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ahhh, the memories it brought back! 
