Wed 18 April 2007

Yesterday morning Scott got the carpet out of our bedroom, and last night we went to bed with the dehumidifier running next to our heads and the sump pump in the storage room emptying a five-gallon pail of water every two minutes into the floor drain in the bathroom next to our bedroom. All night long. I could sleep through that, but had to get up and shut the dehumidifier off during the night; it was too noisy.

He'd also dug a deep hole at a corner of the house, like he did last year when we had this problem, and inserted a pump into a pail in the hole so that water could be diverted away from the basement. But this morning we awoke to water laying on the cement and when he went out to see why the pump had apparently stopped working, he discovered a muskrat sitting on the float. The dog was asleep a few feet away, but surprisingly neither of us had heard any barking.

Sadly, Scott didn't think of getting a photo. Instead he stuck a two-by-four plank into the hole for the muskrat to make its exit, and it was gone by the time I got out there at 8 o'clock.

Last night he came up for supper carrying a four-inch earthworm he'd found making its way across the cement floor. How that got in, he doesn't know, but says it doesn't look good for the condition of the walls.

I think we should turn that entire lower level into a deluxe shelf-lined storage room, cold room, and furnace room, complete with in-floor heating, and build a new living room and bedrooms above-ground, and expand the existing kitchen. But I'm not the carpenter around here. Maybe a carpenter would think it wiser to build a new house from scratch, and somewhere else — perhaps not in a swamp, which is apparently what the yard is becoming. There is water laying in the bush on every side of it. The photo above was taken just after supper tonight, when I headed down the road for a walk. That water running in the ditch has come through the yard, past our house, and is not slowing down any.

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