Today, for the second time in the last three weeks, my basement started to leak again. The torrential rainfall, coming down hard upon the already-saturated ground, meant that there was nowhere else in the backyard for the rain to go, so it ended up in my basement. It's not much really...after I mopped it up and wrung it out it was only a few inches in the bucket. And it's mostly stopped now, and I don't think it's supposed to rain anymore tonight. But it's still annoying, and it makes me nervous about bad things that won't happen, like the entire basement wall caving in.
Of course, things like this are a reminder of how blessed (and lucky) I really am. We've had, what, 15 inches of rain in the past three weeks? Out on my bus route (school's over now BTW) there's people I would pick up that are mostly stranded in their houses because water is over the roads. There are other people in my town who are lower in elevation or who have bad grading or for whatever reason have inches of water pouring into their basement, not just a few drops. Our house sits relatively high and out of trouble, and for that I am thankful.
And then tomorrow we are planning to go to Kansas City for a fun few days. See a soccer game, go to Worlds of Fun (maybe), see the Royals play (maybe), and swim and hang out at grammy and papa's house. Might a little bit more water get into the basement? Perhaps...but in the end, there's not much I can really do about it at this point to stop it. So why not go and have fun with the wife and the kids? Why worry about the unstoppable force of nature? A hundred years from now this house will be long gone, replaced by a futuristic Wal-Mart or buried under a glacier or a barren wasteland of toxie waste. Nobody will remember that once there was a slight annoyance of some rain in my house.
