At Least You'll Have Something To Blog About at 12:42 AM

These were the words spoken to me some three weeks ago (I started writing this in September, so it's now been about three months) by my good friend Zimm, after he helped me carry my furniture out of my basement. But he wasn't referring to the actual moving of the furniture, because if that were the case, I'd already be done with this entry. No, moving furniture was simply a byproduct on this day. We were moving furniture because of the flood in my basement. I had every intention of blogging about this when the ordeal was over, say in four or five days at the most, right? Well, let's just say that I'm blogging about it now (on September 12, mind you), and it's not what one would call "over". But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning.

Summer in Indiana is a bit of a strange time, or at least it can be. Sometimes the climate functions normally. You know, it's hot for a while, then it rains, and it's still pretty hot, but at least everything's not all dried up. But sometimes, as it happened this year, it's really hot and humid for...I don't know, 19 weeks in the summer, and it never rains during that period. Then when it does rain, the rain comes in torrents for eight consecutive weeks, without stopping. It was during one of these torrential times in which our story takes place.
On August 20, if memory serves, the rain started. It came down all day long. I had mixed emotions at first about the rain, because I hadn't mowed my lawn in a good three weeks, which is nice, but it had also started to look scorched, which is not as good. So I'd have to mow the lawn again, but at least there would be patches of green among the brown. Traditionally, of course, the rain falls outside the house, and that was what we were expecting on this day as well. Unfortunately, when Jessica went to do laundry, she found that water was on the floor in the laundry room (which is in the basement). This wasn't an immediate cause for alarm, because hey--lots of things can leak, right?

The problem became apparent when we investigated further and found that the carpet along the walls was a bit...damp. Now this, my friends, got us alarmed. This alarm was multiplied when, in front of our very eyes, the carpet began to get wetter, and said wetness began to spread into the middle of the room. Now, I can take some wetness along the walls, but this was getting ridiculous, you know? To make a long story not as long, we eventually figured out that the sump pump had stopped working. (Duh.) I know approximately as much about sump pumps as I do about most other household appliances. I'm glad they work, and I know what they're supposed to do when they work, but when they stop working, I have no idea what to do with them. So I called both my dad and Jessica's dad, and as it turns out, I could get back to where the sump pump was, reach my hand down into the hole, and see if there's a switch that was tripped. Or something. This was a while ago. All I really remember is that I needed to stick my hand down in the hole that was full of water.

The sump pump is back in the crawlspace of the house. Of course the name "crawlspace" is deceiving, because it implies that there's room for one to crawl. A more accurate title might be "slitherspace", or "rollspace", because those are the two things I could have done more easily than crawling to the sump pump. When I finally did get back there (Jessica went in before me since she fit better, but was unable to reach very far into the opening for the sump pump), I reached into the hole and felt water. And that was about it. After a few minutes of trying to improve my position to reach further down, I gave up. You see, there was no guarantee of me being able to fix the pump even if I was able to locate a switch, or a blockage of some sort, or whatever it was I was looking for. And so, since the rain was still falling and the basement wasn't exactly getting any drier, we called an emergency plumber. Of course, when a service has "emergency" in the title, that translates to "expensive".

And so it's here that I will leave you for now, so as to avoid having this sit as a draft for another two months. I'll finish the story soon. (Maybe this will even push the Will Ferrell video to the archives so that it doesn't load every time you open my blog...)