Rain Rain GO AWAY!!!

Advanced notice: I am entering this post at work on Easter night, therefore, no photos until later. In exchange, I will attempt to make you feel better about the trivial headaches in life by sharing our recent adventure this week.

True to form, we can't stay in one place for longer than 7 days...I'm starting to think we may be gypsies, we keep our suitcases packed to leave on a moment's notice and we have the kennel on speed dial where Jedi and Hermes have a suite reserved for them at all times. Maybe if we could come up with an act we could join the circus! Bill would look great in a leotard.

Anyhow, I was saying, I was loading up the car this past Wednesday to go visit my parents for Easter while Reina was finishing her breakfast. We had had a deluge of rain for about 48 hours and I was thinking how glad I was is wasn't snow to impede our travel yet again. Wrong. I went downstairs to the basement to put something away and *SPLASH* I stepped into 2 inches of standing water.

"No way. That didn't just happen", was my first thought. "%$#!* yes it did", was my next thought. Oh crap. Our beautiful, FINISHED basement was under water, including the man-cave.

Evidently, our sump pump had failed overnight and we had a clogged drainage pipe on the outside of the house. There was a foot (that's 12 inches, mind you) of standing water in the yard, just hanging out, slowly seeping into the foundation while our feeble, rusted sump pump coughed and hiccuped up rainwater into our extra 700 square feet of living space. Not. Good.

Amazingly, I got a plumber out within half an hour, despite all of the tri-state area having similar problems. Pat is my new best friend. Sorry to all former best friends. New pump installed and sucking (in a good way) away, water extraction folks on the way. Crisis averted, disaster contained? Sort of. The carpet-cleaner-water-removal guys didn't get there until about 6pm, after Bill, bless his heart, left work to help me clear out the basement of anything remotely valuable (marriage certificate, electronics, furniture) and the not so valuable (empty cardboard boxes "for in case we move", 300 back issues of ESPN the Magazine).

We got fans and dehumidifiers (thanks Matt and Jordan) to start drying things out while they tore out our carpet and threw away the pad. Meanwhile, Reina and I skipped town and went to my parents' as planned. I felt a twinge or two of remorse for leaving Bill to deal with the rest, he claims to have enjoyed a few days of solitude and got a ton done while we were gone.

Finally, after hemorrhaging cash like we had hemophilia, our basement seems pretty dry and our carpet seems pretty un-installed. On the to-do list: pay to put the carpet back +/- a new pad, clean said carpet, fix that pesky ole drain outside, and wait with baited breath for the March electric bill after running 6 fans and 3 dehumidifiers for a week straight. Awesome.

Can't wait for April Showers!