Home Ownership Can Make Person Cracked Up...

Well, the snow came and went - well sort of. There are blotchy patches of it in my very very soggy backyard now. Can I just say that owning a house is not always what it's cracked up to be? We have owned this house for seven years and 12 days. The day we came for the house inspection in the year 2000 (Y2K, remember??), there was a pond in the basement. A POND and we just walked around it. We were too overwhelmed by it all.

This morning, I went to same basement to check laundry and a found a very small pond (diameter about 12 inches (but not perfectly circular, but you get the idea). And it was SMEL-LY. Yuck. Now, we learned in 2000 that we have a catch basin that needs to be "rodded out" every spring or every other spring. The first year we had to do it twice in the same year. You see that beautiful maple in the front yard has roots that get in the way of sewer drainage. Gross, but important. Way better to have the sewer drain TO THE SEWER, rather than into your basement. Enough said.

We have two shop vacs, one for neat messes and one for disgusting smelly messes. I'll talk about the categorization of messes some other time. Suffice it to say that it wasn't originally my idea, but it makes total sense to me now. So, I got the icky shop vac and the long orange knotty mess of an extension cord (It is easier to untangle than, say, mohair -- and significantly less delicate). As I was shop vac-ing, it seemed that there was an endless supply of smelly and increasingly dark liquid coming from the floor drain around which the pond rested.

As I was watching this happen, my sense of smell left me (oh, thank the goddess), but then I felt I was having an out of body experience of massive anxiety. What was I going to do with the liquid when the vac filled up? How was I going to lift it up the four steps from the basement door to outside? Well, for better or worse, my garden (particularly one of my many lavendar plants) was on the receiving end of it.

Now I'm sitting here sipping my tea, hoping that the sewage smell will leave my olfactory memory. I think I'll go finish the second sock.