Rain Almost Ruined My Day

On Tuesday of this week, we got somewhere between two and three inches of rain in a short period of time.  The night prior, many of the local schools canceled classes in anticipation of the storm.  I scoffed to myself thinking that “back in my day” a little water and wind wouldn’t have kept us out of school.  We would have been in the hallway in the “kiss your butt goodbye” position waiting for the storm to pass.  That was the eighties and nineties, it was a lawless time.  I still thought it extreme to cancel school, but after the onslaught of precipitation and areal flooding we got, I’d say they made an appropriate call. 

At around 2 pm I noticed that I had several new waterfalls in my backyard.  My pond had swollen beyond its banks.  The creek that fed it was raging.   The creek that meets that creek behind my pond’s dam was an orange torrent.  My neighbor’s backyard created the aforementioned cascades, as water billowed over the railroad ties at our fence.  There were rivulets of run off everywhere.  I keep hearing “this is a once in a hundred-year storm” every six months or so.  This was by far the worst storm we’ve had in quite a while.

I was happy that all the work we had done to raise the level of our yard, lay culvert pipes in our creek ditch and build a better spillway on our pond all held up amazingly.  It actually held up better than everything else in the yard.  We made a point when we did that project to make sure anything we did would be way more than appropriate for any amount of water we would receive.  I’m glad I spent the extra money on bigger culvert pipes than necessary, especially after that storm.  Most of my neighbors poorly maintained their drains, pipes, and ditches and they clogged, overflowed, and created aquatic chaos. 

Everyone seemed to blame the neighbor above them, and luckily, we are the bottom of the bowl, so everyone’s water comes to us.  Yay.  One guy cut a ditch that diverted water the wrong way, one guy filled his ditch up with leaves not knowing there is no leaf pick up here, and a few others had clogged drain pipes.  Each issue compounded on the last until the physical and metaphorical levy broke.  Nature is wild.  I still love watching storms, and seeing the raw power of a day like that.  It always reminds me of how little I’m actually in control of.  The key takeaways were that water does what water wants. That leads me to my next discovery.

When we bought this house, a contingency of our VA loan made the prior homeowner cut a hole in the foundation so a sump pump could be installed in our basement.  Apparently, it was prone to flooding.  We didn’t exactly know what this was when we bought the house, and didn’t install a pump until frantically, I had to learn exactly why we needed it on one of those “once every hundred years” storms around eight years ago.  As the water bubbled up out of that sump hole in the corner of the basement we anxiously drove to Lowe’s hardware and got the cheapest sump pump we could get.  Money was very tight back then.  I rigged up a hose, plumbed the pump, and voila we were draining the water.  The basement has cinderblock walls with concrete floors, so thankfully it just found a floor drain.  After some mopping and cussing all was back to normal.

This brings me back to the present.  Yesterday, at the height of the storm, right after I discovered our backyard was underwater, I saw water on the floor of the basement.  Initially I thought it must have overwhelmed my French drain at the back door.  Another problem I’d fixed years ago.  Nope.  The area around the back door was bone dry.  After I got done patting myself on the back, I saw the source of the water.  It was bubbling up from the corner of the basement, from the sump pump area. 

I went over to the pump and discovered it had given up.  It quit at the worst possible time.  I did what any guy would do when an appliance isn’t working, I hit it.  That didn’t help.  I took it out and banged it on the ground. Nothing.  The logic here, aside from getting out aggression, is sometimes a pump’s impeller will get something lodged in it and you can get it going again by hitting it.  If you’re lucky you can dislodge the obstruction.  This was not the case for me.

Once I realized I couldn’t fix it, and the water kept slowly gurgling out of the hole, I added a better sump pump to my Lowe’s cart.  My wife picked it up a few minutes later on her way home and I swapped out the pumps.  Of course, it took another Lowe’s trip to get more PVC parts and frantic reverse engineering of the hose I’d rigged last time to fit the new pump, but I got it done.  Jess and I got the basement squared away, and the water off the floor.  Crisis averted.  The next morning the basement was completely dry, thanks to dehumidifiers and the new pump. 

I was struck with how eight years ago it was a sacrifice for us to get that cheap pump.  I was glad it’d lasted this long.  I was also glad that although it wasn’t crazy expensive to replace, it wasn’t a sacrifice for us anymore.  All the hard work we’ve done around the house, and at our jobs positioned us to be financially able to just make the call and get it fixed asap.  I’m also thankful for these frantic opportunities to learn that I’m more capable than I realize sometimes. 

Although it’s never ideal to be working in nasty water trying to fix a problem, I really enjoyed solving the problem.  Stress isn’t so bad when you can work through it and find resolution on the other side.  Sometimes it’s just all in how you look at stuff I guess, and choosing to be grateful despite what’s happening around you.  I’ve been really trying to look at things like this as lessons and opportunities to grow lately.  I think I’m going to try and frame things this way more often.  The rain didn’t ruin my day, because I didn’t let it.     

---

Some other good news, the pre-sale for my old band’s Vinyl release starts on Monday January 15, 2024. We are excited for this short run of vinyl records and blown away that anyone would care 20 years later about this project. Be sure to check Forceofreckoningrecords.bigcartel.com on Monday for info on how to pre-order.

---