When The Cat's Away.....

....something unusual happens.  Not bad.  Well, sometimes bad.  Not catastrophic.  Just unusual.

The last time Jay left the continental United States, Tessa broke her arm and required minor surgery.  It wasn't a pleasant experience.  The day before he was scheduled to come home, William became the first victim of what I like to call Vomitfest 2011.  Good times.

So he left last week for Australia.  "It's another beautiful day in Queensland," he crowed to me on the phone the other day.  It's winter in Australia, but winter in Queensland means highs in the low-70's with lows in the 50's.  He's loving it.  Our weather is a bit warmer, but doable.  Today was quite pleasant.  It only got up to the low 80's, which for early August I'll take any day of the week.  It stayed cooler today because of the rain we had this morning.

So, now to the "unusual".  It doesn't usually rain quite as much as it did in August.  April, sure.  May and June even.  But August 1st?  We had what can only be described as a deluge for a good part of the morning.  I put on my thinking cap and plugged in our sump pump, thinking that with all the rain in such a short period of time I should be proactive.  Good, right?

Well, yeah.  The sun came out around 1 pm and it was fine.  I needed to use the outlet for something - you see where I'm going with this, don't you? - so I unplugged the pump.  I didn't give it a second thought until about 5 pm, when I asked Tessa to go down in the basement to our food storage and pick out a package of pasta for me to make for dinner.  The conversation went as follows:

Me - Tessa, how come you didn't get the pasta:?

Tessa - Because of the water.

Me - What water?

Tessa - The water in the basement.

Sigh.  I quickly plugged in the pump again and it promptly went off and has continued to go off every few minutes.  We had water in our cold room and storage space.  Luckily our basement isn't finished so it was just concrete.  I was able to soak most of it up with towels and I'm letting the rest sit and hopefully I'll be able to dry it in the morning.  There isn't enough to really try and use a wet-vac on and since there is no carpet it should be fine.  I had to move around some stuff in the cold storage room and in the crawl space but I only threw away a couple of things that should have been thown away a while ago anyway.  Crisis averted.

But seriously?  I sooooo need a vacation.  To Southern California. 

Oh yeah.  That's next week. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't actually sigh when I realized we had water in the basement.  I'll let you use your imagination as to my actual response.  I don't think the kids heard me.  At least I hope not.