I am still sore from this weekend. MizSplotchy is still sore from this weekend.

MizSplotchy kicked absolute ass at the Chicago Half Marathon. Holy crap, did she kick ass. This was her first race, and she finished in the 37th percentile! It rained for the whole damned race, but that didn’t stop her.

She was running with a friend of hers, but they hadn’t come up with a plan for meeting up if they got separated. They got separated. She couldn’t remember exactly where she parked her car. So, she walked a couple more miles having just run 13 miles, soaking wet, the rain still coming down, her lips blue, teeth chattering. She had no phone, she didn’t have her glasses. A nice old lady gave her a plastic shopping bag to put on her head. She eventually found a cop and said, “I need help!!” She then used his phone to call me, I called her friend, she found her car and headed home.

So why am I sore? I didn’t run a crazy-assed race.

Well, fucking Hurricane Ike is why I’m sore. MizSplotchy was gone for pretty much the whole weekend. She had a reunion she went to on Saturday in Evanston, so I was left to take care of our three chilluns, etc. Except it was raining, and raining, and raining.

When we get a large amount of rain, our basement gets a lot of seepage. Unfortunately, we have a lot of living space in the basement. Our family room, the kid’s playroom, and my office are all downstairs. So, I’m scrambling around to feed the kids, set up movies for them on a laptop (our TV is downstairs) to keep them occupied while I handle the basement situation.

I first drag up a crapload of stuff up from the basement, then take all the other stuff I can and stack it off the floor. Next, I take a shopvac to the eighteen different places quickly puddling with water. I did manage to get the kids out of the house to an indoor playground for a couple hours when the rain briefly stopped and the seepage slowed, so I didn’t feel like a completely shitty dad.

So, Sunday. Saturday was paradise compared to Sunday. Sunday brought more rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ike.

There is a drain in our laundry room that leads to an ejector pump. The ejector pump is used in our house to push out waste water from our kitchen, dishwasher, washer, etc. I don’t believe it handles the sewage of the Splotchy household.

I had been dumping the water from the shopvac into this drain on Saturday, and in the early hours of Sunday. By around 10:30am, with several more hours of “Heavy Rain” predicted, the drain stopped taking the water. It wasn’t backing up, but it wasn’t going down.

OH FUCK.

So, Plan B. I stop worrying about the seepage coming into the other parts of the house. The water is slowly but steadily rising in the laundry room, three inches, four inches, five inches. The drain is stopped and the seepage continues to come in. We have to get the water out of the basement somehow.

So…. I get all our empty buckets. I empty a couple large kitty litter containers with handles. I start scooping up the water, and take it upstairs to our side porch. I get a large black garbage can with wheels and place it just outside the side porch. And this is what I did for the rest of the day:

Fill up the buckets and the kitty litter containers
Haul them to the side porch
Dump them into the garbage can
Drag the garbage can fifty feet into our stupid unfinished alley
Dump the garbage can.
(Optional) Say, “FUCK YOU, ALLEY!”

I had to drag the water to the alley, because if I dump the water right outside the house, it’s just going to seep in again. Oh, once more — “FUCK YOU, ALLEY!”

One of our neighbors helped me for a while until his house started getting some water problems in the basement. My brother’s girlfriend came over for a while. When MizSplotchy finally got home, she started helping as well. We briefly had a borrowed swimming pool pump attached to a garden hose that we also used to pull some water from the basement, until the person we borrowed it from needed it back due to their own basement issues.

I figure I must have dragged at least eighty full garbage cans of water from our house. AT LEAST.

So, I’m sore. MizSplotchy is sore.

People had it much, much worse than us, but this is our story. We hope you found it heartwarming.