the joys of home ownership in a time of global climate change

Here's a quick update on the water hazard that had been our backyard earlier in the week.  Some of you may have seen Miz Susan's Facebook posts about it but here's another visual for those who watch the Weather Channel just to see middle-Americans' lives turned upside-down.

Hmmmmm.  Who can I blame this one on?  Fine.  Whom.

Even with the low-tech camera on my borrowed cell phone (Miz Susan keeps me hanging around with promises that we'll go out and shop for new phones "next weekend") you can see the effects of the downpour Wednesday night thru Thursday's AM hours.  When I left for work at 7:30 on Thursday, the backyard was nowhere near as bad as this.  But when I got home at 12:30 after Susan's desperation call for help, this was pretty much the scene.

We had trickles of water coming into the basement from all sides and corners of the foundation but that's business as usual after heavy rainfalls or spring snow melts.  But the basement's biggest issue was the well in the northeast corner, dug once upon a time, perhaps for a sump-pump.  We're used to seeing that 18" deep pit fill halfway up with water once in awhile.  But on Thursday morning, the water level was threatening to come up past floor-level and threaten all of the junk we've got haphazardly strewn around in cardboard boxes.

Susan had been playing human sump pump and had emptied dozens of buckets' worth of water into the laundry tubs.  She was exhausted and near at a breaking point with the downside of the dream of owning her own home.  I think her line went something like, "Forget this!!!".  Or maybe something more colorful.

I took over the bucket brigade duties and started making a little progress.  She'd been working with a two- gallon pail and barely keeping ahead of the flood.  I put the 5-gallon bucket (known affectionately around the basement as Big Green) into play and even with me staggering up the steps, out the side door and out to the street to dump the water, I was able to start to get ahead of the threat.  Not for long, though, as the saturated front lawn kept forcing more water into the hole.  I think we were finally able to catch our breath on that job at about eight that night.

All that lower level progress didn't encourage the lake in the backyard to go away though.  What you can see in the picture was still just sitting there come early evening, an occasional soft breeze stirring up a slight ripple across it's otherwise smooth, mirror-like surface.  Picturesque and even romantic when seen from the end of the dock up at the cabin.  In our backyard, nothing like that.

At that point, I headed out to try to find a utility pump to start moving some of what was covering our backyard back to its proper place in the water cycle.  That's what these things are called apparently, utility pumps.  This is a tool which had never really been on my radar before.  Not so surprising as I am about the unhandiest of all handymen.  I mean, I can conceptualize what one of them is supposed to do but what it's called or where to find one in the big boxes or the local hardware stores...not a clue.  Up until now.

I now know what they're called and where you should be able to find one in a store (except at Walmart where all I got were uncomprehending blank looks though pleasant enough) and what the price ranges are and even a little bit about their maximum pumping volumes in gallons per hour.  Note that I said "where you should be able to find one in a store".  The nice people at Menard's and three local mom and pops told me that they'd sold out of their stock by 1 that afternoon. Maybe they'd have more in within a week.  By which time our house might have either floated away down Laurel Avenue toward the river or collapsed into the basement when the foundation gave way.

So, I ended up doing what I should have done in the first place.  I went groveling to the neighbors.  Larry (who had been kind enough to lend me the above-mentioned cell phone while I waited for Miz Susan to motivate to shop for new ones) lent me his utility pump.  He was using Michael's utility pump because Michael had convinced Larry that his (Michael's) pump was far superior to Larry's.  Larry told me that the two pumps were probably equally effective but he and I both know that it's tough to say no to Michael when he's trying to lend you something.  Between the two of them, Michael and Larry own at least one of every hand tool invented since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  But if they both own one, Michael's is probably better.  That's just the way it goes in the world of hand tools on this stretch of Laurel Avenue.

I got the damn thing across the street and waded across the back yard where I hooked the pump up to 50' (or more) of garden hose and plugged it into an outlet in the garage (I had to disconnect the garage door opener; we're short on outlets in the garage).  I'd run the hose out to the alley and as soon as I plugged that bad boy in and plunked it down in about six inches of water, the far end of the hose began to spew out water in a rush.  It was coming out at about the same rate that our garden hose produces when we've got it tapped into the spigot on the side of the house.  This utility pump was going about its business in earnest.

We let it run all night.  Kelly next door was trying to drain her decorative pond into the alley at the same time so we had quite the torrent headed westward down the alley.  I woke up at 4AM and checked the sump pump well in the basement and the utility pump in the back yard,  It was making progress; the shoreline of the lake in the back yard had definitely receded but there was still plenty of water left to go.  The pump was still doing it's work when I left for mine at 7:30.  Susan told me that she finally shut it off at about 10 that morning when it started to suck air.  When I got home in the afternoon, I plugged it back in to dry up some low spots in the yard.

The major casualty in this flood seems to have been our clothes dryer.  It's been three and a half days now and Susan's dad's advice of blowing a fan on the back of the dryer hasn't panned out.  We'll probably be calling a repair service tomorrow.  There's undoubtedly some sort of karmic justice in our clothes dryer taking a fatal hit even though most everything else is on it's way to drying out.  But I'm damned if I can see it.

Miz Susan and I have a trip planned to Menard's, probably Wednesday this week.  We'll be looking for another dehumidifier for our basement (we'd needed that before the latest natural disaster), a large pot into which to re-pot her gi-normous jasmine plant which had outgrown its current pot a couple of summers ago and at least one new handle and lock set for the sliding door from the kitchen out onto the deck.  Maybe two sets if Miz Susan's esthetic sense is offended by mismatched handles on the two doors.  But you can bet that we'll be looking to pick up a utility pump, as well.  There is no way that I'm going forward into a world full of  changing and uncertain weather patterns without at least one utility pump of our own.  Please God, let Menard's get those things back into stock.