Seriously, I don't have time for this.

It rained all night, so the first thing I did this morning was check the pumps and the basement. The GFCI hadn't tripped, the pumps were working fine. There was still water in the basement. *sigh* I vacuumed up about a gallon. The water's doing a pretty good job of staying out of the way, I think. There's more that I can vacuum, but not much, and not easily, so I'm just going to wait 'till I come home for lunch to do something more about it. I mopped the water around a bit to thin it out instead of letting it pool. Combined with the fans, that should help keep it from being too terrible.

I want to dig a trench around our basement floor to catch all the water that comes in and have the trench sloped to the drain that's in the corner of the basement. Yeah, we have a drain in the basement. Yeah, it seems to be situated at one of the higher points on the basement floor. Brilliant.

I hate having a water problem in the basement. It's not a major problem -- we've managed to manage it. But I'd rather control it. Eliminate it.

I love having the extra storage room in the basement, and a nice out-of-the-way place to keep our washer and dryer, but if someone came up to me right now and offered to fill in the entire basement with concrete, I would not immediately reject the idea....

And I got up all early this morning so that I'd be able to get to work nice and early and get settled into a good groove off working on my project before everyone else started showing up. I'm behind and really need to start catching up. If I could, I'd take the day off again so I could spend the day fighting the water as it comes in, or trying to emergency divert it from the outside. I just really need to get a handful of things taken care of at work, so I'm doing the best I can.

It's good to vent about it, though. Thanks for listening.

Yesterday, we experienced what is becoming an annual event: The Basement Flood. Just like last year, it appears that the main reason is that the GFI breaker on the electrical line that controls the pumps in the window wells tripped. So the window wells filled with water and seeped into the basement.

I noticed the problem before it got too bad -- a thin layer of water over about a third of the basement, and thankfully noticed it was because the pumps weren't working. I reset the GFI and they started working, then went to damage control in the basement. I spent about two hours last night pushing water around with a mop and a big squeegee and vacuuming it up in my little wet-dry vacuum (maybe I should get a bigger one), which pulled up about 5 gallons of water. Then I set the fans out.

I got up this morning to discover that most of the water was gone, and what was left had collected in an area near the far corner. I moved the fans over there and spent another half-hour or so vacuuming up water (about 3 gallons, this time). I moved some of the boxes around so the water that had collected under them can evaporate, too. I'll go back down in another hour or so (Yeah, I took the day off from work -- at least the morning, anyway -- so I can deal with this.) and move some more stuff around and see if there's anywhere else I can target for water removal. I'm actually pretty impressed by how much it helps to have those fans working down there.

It doesn't look like any of our stuff is damaged -- it's all in plastic boxes, with much of it up on cinder blocks.

I wonder what caused the GFI to trip? When I reset it last night, in the rain, the pumps came on and started working -- it didn't immediately trip. It's been fine all night -- the pumps were still working when I woke up this morning. I guess we'll just have to get in the habit of checking the GFI at least once a week, and definitely when we know it's going to rain.

Our window wells do have drains in them, but they're obviously clogged -- and have been for quite some time, since the previous owner decided that installing a pumping system was a better solution than depending on the drains in the window wells.

Flood Damage Most of these books were damaged in the Basement Flood of '05. A few are salvagable.

These are the books I lost in the basement flood. One books seems undamaged: it was a Batman book (hardcover) that was still shrink-wrapped since I never got around to reading it. Two of the books appear salvagable: "In The Beginning" (a book about Genesis) and a copy of (a translation of) the Dead Sea Scrolls. They're on the left of the picture. There's a big stack of books on the right that are beyond salvage: several of a theological bent, a few political ones, and a few bicycle-related books. I won't be replacing them.

Three books are unsalvagable and need to be replaced: "Batman: The Complete History" and two Batman trade paperbacks -- "Cataclysm" and "Knightfall" (Part 1). That one in the middle is the history of Batman coffee table book. yarbiedoll said that she was sad when she saw that some of my Batman books were destroyed. That coffee table book is probably the worst of the damage from my perspective.

Also, there was a collection of emails and a journal from my last job. They were all from about a year before I was finally able to move back to my current job -- just when things started to get hellish. I had started keeping a journal and copies of emails and IM conversations in order to document an a trail of how management was sticking it to me. At the time, it really looked like they were trying to make me look bad and fire me. Now, four years later, reviewing the papaer trail, it still looks like that's what they were trying to do. It's no big deal now, though -- I'm back with a job I usually enjoy, working with people I like. The papers might could have been salvaged -- they were damp, but still able to be pulled apart individually.

It wasn't worth saving them.

I just read through them all again, remembered how I was getting screwed at the time, and put them in the pile that was going to the trash. I figure if I ever got in an employment situation where a potential employer was asking me about details of that part of my career history, wasn't satisfied with my reason for leaving being that I found a better opportunity with more potential for leadership and growth, and needed a paper record of how management was treating me, it wouldn't help. In a situation like that, I could have a note written in triplicate, signed by the Almighty, and they still wouldn't be satisfied. All of that was 3-4 years ago and I've firmly put that behind me and established a new, solid work history with my current job.

So the end result is that I got rid of another box full of "stuff" that's just taking up space.

Also, wet paper really stinks.