Life of the Lintee Bean

My basement flooded AGAIN.  At this point, I may be best off building an ark and getting the cats life preservers and floating out of here.

My basement is a giant mud pit.  I will tackle it on Saturday. It’s gotten colder and is snowing now, so I nearly bit the pavement a few times this morning as everything is icy. There were a few streets totally under water in my neighborhood. I have REALLY had it with the Chicago sewer system. It’s flipping ridiculous!

I haven’t been struck my lightening yet, despite cursing God a LOT the past few months – especially last night. I was already upset about Louie’s diagnosis and prognosis (3 to 6 months). The flood put me over the edge.

I don’t know which is worse, finding the basement already flooded – or finding it flooding. I think the latter. When I got downstairs last night there was water – but not a lot, it was all around the one drain. So, I started shop-vaccing and dumping the water outside. After a while it became obvious it was coming in faster than I could bail – so I used a bucket. Then I stood on the drain a while… then I stuffed an old towel into the drain and went back to bailing. Then I saw that water was now coming in the other drain (inside the enclosure) and tried stuffing towels around the door so it wouldn’t come in… but the water just kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper and I was crying and screaming, and I could hear the cats upstairs killing each other… so I gave up. By the time I got upstairs it was backing up the sinks on the first floor too.

Ironically, I have an appointment with a handyman to install standpipes in the basement drains on Tuesday.  I’ll keep the appointment and hope it works for future rainstorms.  In the meantime, I can only hope the furnace, freezers, and other appliances survived their most recent mud bath.