Where am I? what day is it?

No pictures today...is it Wednesday? Thursday? day? night? Since Sunday morning when we discovered a flood in our normally dry basement, we have been pumping the water out every 45 minutes to one hour around the clock. While I am trying to remain optimistic, my optimism is wearing thin.

Sunday morning right before leaving for church we discovered the water problem, we had kept our friends' "children" overnight and we attributed the water problem at the time to maybe a backed up pipe. After all, it had been four years since we had that many people showering and flushing in our house. As a side note, it had been many years since we had four teenagers in the house and it was so much fun to have them! John stayed home from church and the kids and I went to church. Now just a another little side note of Murphy's Law. I left my purse at church after asking my MIL and my daughter and SIL and granddaughter to go to lunch with us. Now here I am sitting at the restaurant , nine of us and no money and I thought, no problem, John is meeting us here and he will have money or cards or something and after waiting the alloted amount of time, I excused myself and called him and he was not meeting us! The water was still coming in! Lunch...begging for mercy with the promise of getting the money to them and home...still more water coming in. Who would have thought of what was to come? (By the way, I did remember to go back and pay the restaurant on Monday!)

Now we had a little pump because twice before we had a little water and we kept it there in the event that should happen again. Both times were extreme rains and we pumped the water and it was gone. Here we are pumping every hour all day Sunday...and here we are on this whatever day it is right now still pumping. John and I are on shift work and my shift just started at 3 this morning. Thank goodness we work for ourselves and so close to home because we are leaving work every hour and coming home to pump out the basement. Now if you are still with me.......you might ask "where is all this water coming from?" as we are now asking also. We have had a backhoe in and dug up the drains...I think that was yesterday AM and they are running OK, not great though and then yesterday we got the bright idea to measure the water. We have a hose running out the side door and I grabbed a bucket and filled it......20 gallons of water every hour!!!! Now by my math, that is over 480 gallons a day for four days and that is when the light bulb came on....this is not our drains or just run off. We have not been using much water for the last few days...no laundry, camp showers and only flushing when absolutely necessary. We checked our meter and we only used 19 gallons yesterday. (Aren't we being "green" through all this?)

Back to that light bulb moment..(I can't believe anyone would still be reading this) I remembered that Christmas day the road in front of our house "blew up" A fifteen foot circle of pavement just blew out of the road! At first they thought it was a water main break and then after testing the water and finding that there were no chemicals in it, they realized that it had to be a natural spring. As I was standing in the driveway emptying buckets I thought of that and now we are questioning if that spring has not found it's way to our basement???? How in the world do we fix that? Well today....or later today, is it Thursday? we are going to have to break up the concrete in the basement and make a pit and install a sump pump. Not fixing the main problem, but hopefully allowing us to SLEEP!

Timer went off, time to pump......Not one to waste time, during that pumping I basecoated a window frame that I am getting ready for the princess' toy room and found a cute little rocking cow wood piece in the stash. I'll basecoat it the next pumping. In between, after this blogging I will be working on a penny rug that I have started and more knitted dishcloths (I made two last night and read my Country Living magazine during pumpings. I think that I must have got an A in Uses Time Wisely in elementary school.

So now that I have posted this story...mostly for my benefit, I just needed to get it all off my chest, I will be listening to the wind howl, hoping the house holds together in these winds and really hoping that the power stays on! We need it to pump the water!!!! Hey back to the optimism, it could be so much worse and I realize that every moment of all this. I am watching the news and listening to the fire and police scanner and there are so many people having so much worse problems than this! Just had to share it! If you are still with me and reading...thanks for listening!