Mountain Clams

What a Crappy Day

I probably shouldn't be writing this now. I should be working on my project. But I had to get this down. Why do most of my blogs fit best under "Life" as a category? I don't feel like I have one at the moment!

The Reader's Digest version is this: the main sewer line in my house backed up. Mr. Rooter came and cleared it.

The longer version goes a little more like this. I got the call from my daughter that the basement was starting to flood. We've seen this before. It usually means the tree in the front yard is getting a little too friendly with the house's main sewer line. It's not normally a big deal - just get by on as little water as possible and call Mr. Rooter to clear the line for another year or so.

I'll admit my part in the way this all plays out and tell you that I didn't get an appointment right away. I wasn't planning on being at the house over the weekend, and wanted to be there when the plumber worked on it, both to make sure that it's just the usual root problem and to pay for it. The appointment was made for today.

I got back to the house on Monday to find more -- let's just call it "water" to be polite -- in the basement than I've ever seen before! It is at this point that my daughter tells me a line I'm not likely to forget: "It kept getting worse every time I took a shower." Huh. Imagine that! This is the daughter that works in a health club. One with showers. I would say "blond moment," except that she's not.

To my son's credit, he used the mop and picked up some of the water that was collecting. Unfortunately, he then dumped the collected water into the toilet. Normally, I think recycling is a fine thing, but in this case, I think we could've done without.

So last night, we moved her cats upstairs where they're normally not allowed to go. I started on the task of getting the wet/dry vac out and sucking up as much of the water as I could. It's a pretty big vacuum, and when it's full of water, it's a bitch to get up the stairs, but I did just that about five times. I used the really wide, narrow nozzle so I could take it outside and dump what it picked up without worrying about anything chunky.

We looked around the basement and noticed that lots of things that aren't accustomed to the experience of water were experiencing water for the first time. Among them were my daughter's old laptop, a bunch of her clothes, my entire comic collection, and some of my board games.

Oh, and remember the cats that were put upstairs? One of them experienced water, too. She got past the door at the top of the stairs, slinked down the stairs almost fearfully, and perched on the bottom step above the edge of the pool that was once my basement floor. She desperately wanted to go back to my daughter's room, so she jumped for it... right into the water... on a tiled floor. Much clawing, scrabbling and splashing ensued, but not a lot of forward momentum, at least for the first few seconds. I was at the top of the stairs, so couldn't see where she went after that. Wherever it was, she went there fast once she got going.

The pantry area is pretty close to the center of the house, and pretty close to the center of the puddle that formed. There wasn't a ton of water here, though, and I found why. This is where we store things like paper towels, toilet paper and napkins. They valiantly gave it all! They did what they could to stem the tide. It wasn't quite enough, but they sure tried.

We finished up for the night, and I went to my ex-wife's to borrow her shower. (Thank you, Dana.) I really needed to clean up. Thank goodness I know someone not too far away. I got back to my place and went to sleep. In the morning, I woke up a bit late. Both kids were gone: Rick to school and Cady to work. I went downstairs to check on things and found that the puddle had returned. I'm guessing one of the kids flushed a toilet or something. It wasn't too terrible, especially considering the depth from the day before. I went to work.

Just after lunch, I got the call that Mr. Rooter was going to be at my house within 30-45 minutes, so I left work to meet them. When I got to the house, I unlocked the back door since that's the most direct way to the basement and the cats were upstairs. I then went to open the gate that leads to the back door and realized that right in front of the gate is where a bunch of snow from my driveway ended up. I broke out the shovel and dug a quick path to get the gate open. Right as I finished, the plumbers arrived. I showed them where they would be working and went back outside to clear a path through the snow for their equipment. They finished up pretty quickly, even cleaning up the shower in the downstairs bathroom that had caught much of the gunk from the sewer line.

After they left, I made a list of all the stuff that needed to happen, including moving the rest of my games upstairs, moving my daughter's stuff to the dining room so the rest of the basement could be cleaned, and lots of mopping. The first step was to move the washer and dryer and get the shovel to remove the gunk that settled under them. That was probably the most disgusting part of the evening, but sadly, not the only one.

Lots of moving of stuff, cleaning and mopping followed, and the basement slowly got back to the way it was before. Both kids were being pretty helpful, even if Rick stressed out over not being able to move the dryer very well. He didn't realize that it wasn't all that heavy. All he saw was a huge appliance. I had to say it to him: "Judge me by my size, do you?" The box fan is running still, trying to dry out the concrete in the laundry room. We'll mop the tiled areas tomorrow.

I'm done, and I'm grungy. I went up to my room and sat on my bed. My butt felt wet, which I attributed to working in the water for the past couple hours. I changed into sweats. I sat on my bed again, getting ready to work on that project I should still be doing. It was then that I realized that one of Cady's cats whizzed on my coat, which was sitting on my bed, and I sat right in it twice. I stripped the bed down and cleaned myself up before putting on the only other long, comfortable thing I own - my Led Zeppelin pajamas. I made myself some tea and talked with Ray for a little while, then sat down to... well, as it turns out, write this.

I better get back to working on that project now. If you'll excuse me.... Wow, is it 11:00 already?

Labels: life

posted by Brett @ 12:11 AM