Ah spring, that wonderful time of year when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love.
And the middle-aged man’s finance turns to thoughts of home repair.
Mom and I are into our third year living in this house. Sometimes I wonder if bringing us up here was a mistake. Then I remember how a few months after we left there was an armed standoff the next neighborhood over. And the house that blew up around the corner a few months after that with the body found in the basement. And the rising crime in the city. Not to mention all the junk we divested ourselves of by moving.
Things change. Sometimes we make the change, and sometimes it just happens.
Our first spring in this house we got off easy. Last spring I had to buy a shop vac to suck a few hundred gallons of water out of the basement. This year is a lot like last year, but I caught it early. Unfortunately, last night the old sump pump started having problems and I was faced with a choice.
Stay up all night babying it, if not emptying the cock by hand. Or getting up to a foot of water in the morning.
Hey, I may not be as young as I used to be. But after college I sometimes worked third shift. Unlike that job, this time I didn’t need to worry about phone calls at 3am regarding fires or suicides, so I settled down on the couch with the cats and ran downstairs every five minutes to keep things dry-ish. I’d get some exercise, enjoy some Burn Notice, and perform a necessary task. My only regret was that I hadn’t bought snacks.
Snacks are important when you’re going to be up all night.
Thanks to some Twitter friends, I got the idea to clean out the pit. Since the sump would pump eventually, it seemed logical that it was clogged. So I rolled up my sleeve and reached waaaayyy down there to pull out the muck. Of course, if my arm got stuck I suppose I could have drowned, which would have been unfortunate. What a way to go. Soggy and snackless in my own basement.
My plan was to die at 96 with my arm around a supermodel while riding in my flying car.
Good news: I didn’t drown.
Better news: the sump worked itself out around 1am.
This morning I woke up on my own at the normal time and things downstairs were no worse than expected. In the Victorian era “things downstairs were no worse than expected” would mean that the cook was fighting with the butler as he was ironing my newspaper. Today that meant the water hadn’t risen to biblical proportions. And not a cook or butler in sight.
Anyway.
Later this week I’ve got a guy coming to figure out what’s going on and how much it’ll cost to stop it. I never wanted to be a homeowner, yet here we are. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go downstairs and check on the help.