Aug 26 2009
And That Was the Week That Was
You’ve had them. I’ve had them. We’ve all had them. I am speaking about those weeks when on Monday, it all looks oh-so low-key and then the crap (foreshadowing) hits the fan.
I didn’t have a whole lot on my plate this week….get the kids trained, up and out for the new school year, do my work, tackle the garden and then shut it down for a lazy weekend.
Stupid me….
In hindsight, I say that a lot.
It started on Wednesday night, the eve before school started. A tropical storm, which is pretty damn rare for Iowa, blazed through, dumping, in my estimation, two inches of rain in just over an hour.
Usually, this causes a bit of terror in me because if I don’t keep the gutters spotless, I am up the rest of the night emptying rooms in the basement, washing whatever the kids left on the floor and getting intimate with the carpet cleaner. (Setting: Power Suck.)
What I failed to consider was the rather important fact that gargantuan amounts of rain in a short span of time would rather easily, overwhelm my gutters no matter how clean they are.
Rain water gushed over the gutter on my northwest corner. And, where was gravity taking it?
Right down into the window well below where it backed up and found its way around that particular window into the room below…..the daughter’s room, complete with, I swear, every single piece of clothing she has worn this summer, buried so deep, it would have required a miner’s helmet and a backhoe for me to excavate on a dry day.
But, guess what? Her clothes float. There’s a break.
I bet if I had entered that room right then, I would have had a fairly accurate reenactment of what a U-Boat crew felt when a depth charge breached the hull.
Unfortunately, I did not, so we didn’t recognize the flood until the entire neighborhood emptied into my basement.
Ah, bleeping, bleeping, bleep, bleep, bleeping bleep!
The wife ran the carpet cleaner while I emptied the room and jerked furniture around. In goes every fan we own plus the dehumidifier. Out goes our patience.
Kids that should have been in bed kept appearing.
Theme song for the night, “Go to bed!” Can’t carry that tune very well.
I sent her to bed once water was no longer squishing betwixt the toes but I stayed up another four hours scared stiff that it would rain again, banging out load after load of very wet laundry and once again humping furniture so the fans could work their minimal magic.
About five minutes later, or so it seemed, dawn broke, I was up, very sore and tired but hey!
First day of school!
Must…get…the…kids…out…the…door. Don’t have a clue what I made for breakfast, vaguely recall what they were wearing but they were delivered for another year of learning with smiles on their faces. That I remember.
Thursday and Friday passed uneventfully…that is if you don’t count the wife coming home sick and her car making a noise like it had very loose snow chains on the front tires. (Prognosis: Rogue virus for the former. Broken bolts holding the sway bar up on the latter.)
Saturday dawned with nothing pressing on the schedule. My plan was to catch up on some cleaning, keep the kids out of the wife’s hair so she could sleep and vegetate.
That plan went out the window when the first load of laundry emptied. Suddenly, very foul water started flowing out of the basement drain followed by a disgusting sound of glug, glug, glug of sewage backing up also.
Once the gag reflex (I am world-renowned when it comes to my gag reflex.) subsided, on went the rubber gloves and old shoes. I grabbed my bucket, screamed at the wife to start calling people and fast and waded into easily the worst mess I have ever experienced.
All was going fairly well until my daughter accidentally flushed the upstairs toilet. Back comes the gag reflex along with everything else.
Help couldn’t arrive until late in the afternoon so I spent the rest of my morning cleaning, disinfecting and trying to prevent the kids from turning on any tap for more than a second or flushing a toilet again.
Eventually, the cavalry rode in and saved the day. A rather massive tree root had worked its way into the main line out. And, over time, it became clogged to the point that it had nowhere to go but backwards.
Return to sender. Not the kind of package you want to see again.
Once evening came, the wife took the kids over to the neighbor’s and borrowed her shower before sending them to bed.
I gave everything one last disinfecting wipe and twelve hours after it all started, I was finally able to crawl into a hot shower myself.
Scrub, wash, rinse, repeat until I was able to inhale and smell anything other than sewage or disinfectant.
A miserable end to a rather rotten week but come Sunday morning, my wife looked at me and said I was the real hero.
She had been in no condition to assist…it took all of what little energy she had left to keep the kids contained.
“Thank you. I really appreciate you taking care of all of that.”
My reward?
An afternoon of golf.
And since that always make recharges my batteries, bring on the next disaster. Just let me buy a nose plug first.
