What's that saying, again?

 Life is what happens when you're making other plans. Is that the right one? Or maybe I mean, "no good deed goes unpunished."

Over spring break I scrubbed all our kitchen cabinets. Then a sealed, unopened jar of honey fermented and leaked on our counter behind some other items and we had ants.

I scrubbed the walnut floor in our library, then the basement sump pump died, flooded the basement, and now the basement stuff is all sitting on my clean library floor.

I surrender! I get it- no more cleaning!

Sump Pump, part deux

Nothing like shared misery. 

Any of you who have had to deal with a failed sump pump just did a groan over that title. 

Most of you know that I was signed up to do Bike to the Bay last weekend. I don't need to rehash that as you can scroll further down and read about it yourself. Here's part of the story you don't know, because it hadn't happened yet.

Last Friday night I drove my car, full of camping gear (to be explained in another post) to the end of the bike event and we drove Dada's car back, backtracking the route we would be biking Saturday. Midway through the fifty mile route he receives a phone call from our renter.

All of you have figured out where this is going.

Our renter was heading out of town for two weeks on Saturday. Friday night, while we were en route on our next day's bike route, he discovered the sump pump had died and there were two inches of water all across the basement floor. Seeping into the drywall. Soaking baseboards. Generally up to no good.

So we scrap the last fifth-ish of the bike route to check it out. Then followed a trip to Lowe's for a new sump pump and other assorted supplies. Calls to neighbors to see who has a squeegee since we didn't think about that while in Lowe's. Old towels? Company, since misery loves it?

Out with the old sump pump, in with the new. Water draining, situation assessed, keys exchanged, condolences shared. We drive home. We kiss the sleeping kids and discuss tomorrow morning drop off plans. 

We stumble into bed just before midnight on a day before we need to be up at about 5:30 so we can finish prepping for and traveling to the start of a fifty mile bike ride. 

"I only laugh when I think of my life." -Joe Grippo

Since then, Dada has been to the rental house at least six times and I've been there at least three times to empty dehumidifiers, reposition fans, rip out the wet drywall, beg neighbors to let us finish filling their trash cans with bags of drywall and insulation and drywall screws and nails and mess, spray the studs and baseboards with bleach water, shop vac sweeping, etc. Some of you know exactly what all that looks like because you've lived it. Thankfully there was no carpet to deal with or drowned sofas, electrical outlets were all high above the water and the seepage, and the renters are out long enough to get a very good start on the tear out-clean up-fix-redo.

Life is messy.

Anyone know a guy whose life passion is to cut/install/mud/sand/paint drywall? Send 'em thisaway. 

Storms weathered

I know some of you guys keep an eye on our weather and just wanted to let you know that Dada and I camped out downstairs on the futon in the basement so we could keep an ear on the sump pump. It's only trickling now after gushing pretty good last night. Apparently we didn't get all of the rain we were supposed to. It's back down to 37 degrees and is much, much drier outside than it was last night. We did have some big wind, but the power only blinked out long enough to cause Dada to sit straight up out of a dead sleep, see the blinking clock radio, and start to panic. I reassured him that it had just happened. We reset the clock and spent an uneventful night. Just the way we like 'em! Then this morning we saw that we had indeed lost a few panels of siding way up near the roof, but not too bad for as much wind as we had. Just goes to show, if your basement doesn't flood, you can always count on the roof blowing off. Hehe! ;)

The following excerpt is from my friend Meredith. Her two boys know Care Bear from preschool and Jacob is now in her kindergarten class:


I had to laugh, as we were pulling into the Y on Monday, Zachary was wondering if Carrie was going to in the kid zone.

Jacob then proceeded to tell us that Carrie was now his girlfriend. I said since when? He said since today!!

They crack me up. So you will have to ask Carrie.....


So I did. She looked at me like, "what in the world are you talking about?" and then said, "well, IIIIIIIIIII didn't say so." And just like that, I suppose, he was history. Another storm weathered ;)

R.I.P. Sump Pump ?- 2007

I have been delinquent in blogging, yes. I do have an excellent reason. Two Mondays ago, our sump pump passed away. I went downstairs to see if I could determine why our phones were not working, and as I opened the door to the finished basement, I immediately understood why: the bottom step was completely covered in water and it had worked its way up to the very crest of the second stair. All told, we had 14" of water in our basement. Our cable modem was swimming. That's why the phones were out. And the internet. And just about everything else.

Sooooo, now we have a naked basement and I'm typing this on Dada's poor work laptop. Phones are back up and so is the internet. The tuner in our TV is dead, but that happened from the electrical "surge" we had in June when something very, very close to our house was hit by lightning and fried a lot of our stuff. Now we had two dead computers. Haven't tested the printer yet. Dada's holding out hope for his stereo system. I'm not so optomistic. It was submerged. As were all our electrical outlets. At some point when we have the soft and hardware we'll be needing, I'll post the pictures I took of everything floating. And then of the garbage at the curb. Bless the trashmen. A little beer goes a long way...

Anyway, now we get to re-do the basement the way we want it. We plan on doing tile this time. And we'll need new drywall for the bottom 2' of the walls. And some more insulation. And more appliances. Hehe. How convenient that there is a Best Buy opening up near our home!

And for those of you who were wondering, yes, the poker table survived intact. Smart move to put metal legs on it. We lost both couches... I keep teasing Dada that it was an expensive way to get a futon- I'd been campaigning for one for quite awhile. We needed to dispose of those couches anyway. Wendy, one of them was the one we bought out there for $20 while you guys were in Alaska and we had your truck! Served us well. No shame in any of the stuff we lost, that's for sure. Cleanup continues and we are having fun planning the "new" room.

Blogging will be incredibly sporadic for awhile and I apologize. We're going to be picking out a new laptop for ourselves instead of a desktop, so anyone who loves their laptop, feel free to send us tips/ suggestions as to what to buy.

Also R.I.P. to Dada's guitar which has a funny shape to it now but he's thinking about trying to have restored, all his climbing gear, most of our photo albums, tons of children's books, and many art supplies. Discouragingly, most of that stuff was in plastic Rubbermaid bins, but the water was so high that it popped the lids and invaded anyway. Please learn from our mistake and don't store anything of value on the bottom shelves of bookcases if you have even a hint of possible water damage! Our wedding album was also down here. The restoration people dried out the pictures but the album itself was ruined. The pictures smell funky, but it's wonderful they turned out as well as they did!

Just wanted to let you all know that we're hanging in there and what we were up to. Dada also got his wisdom teeth out yesterday morning, so we are staying busy. We love you all and hope things settle down sooner rather than later! Hehe! Happy end of August! Be well and know we're thinking about all y'all even if you don't hear from/ about us for awhile!