Wiped:
I’m really dead exhausted, and not a hell of a lot of good with work stuff today; it’s taking me ten times the amount of effort to do anything, and I have no focus.
The turbofan’s rental has been set up for a week, and we’re purchasing one from Sears. We’re also looking at sealing up whatever cracks in the foundation wall that are giving us fits; there’s something back there, for sure. The problem is that we’d have to take down big chunks of the library to get at the drywall, and then tear out drywall…
We decided with a new storm system coming through and the ground utterly saturated (the village of Lisle came round and offered people sandbags, f’r goodness sake) that what we would do is to keep shifts going to watch the rain and backyard water levels. Susan dug a drain pool a little while ago, and there’s a makeshift setup for a removable sump pump to be lowered down into it while suspended on two PVC piles. Crude, but it keeps the pump’s intake out of the mud.
As in all night shifts.
As in Jim stays up all night and watches the back yard for flooding and the basement for leaks as the rain gushes down from the heavens, and deals with a recalcitrant backyard sump pump that Susan had accidentally left on to overheat without water being there to pump.
I tried to get some sleep earlier on in the night, but Susan had left the upstairs telephone in our bedroom, and that went off when one of Grandma’s friends called. And then Mere got to her ‘I need to read my book for school’ part, and decided that she HAD to have Daddy read to her from THE HOBBIT. I wanted to get Mere stuck on Tolkien, but darn it, kid, not when I’m trying to sleep…
And I couldn’t turn her down, so we read for well over an hour. Then I was up for a while, and went back in for a couple of hours; Susan’s on steroids for her bronchitis, so she was up and watching things from 10 till after midnight. Then I was up all night until 5ish, and then collapsed for a while, and got up for work-at-home. Very groggily.
Luckily, no basement leaks, and the fan and the dehumidifier go on and on and on.