A Dark and Stormy night

So, last night, a thunderstorm took out the power on my block, at around 10PM. Lut was nearing the end of an eight-hour taskforce in City of Heroes, and was rather annoyed not to be able to finish it.

In the middle of the night, we both wake up. Lut checks the time on the cell phone, because we're both thinking it must be almost dawn by now. No, it's 1:30.

It's still raining. The power is still out.

Lut calls the power company. The power will be back on at 4:30AM. No big deal. We should be sleeping anyway.

Except that the power's out. During a storm.

The sump pump in the basement is electric.

So, my basement flooded, again. In a new and interesting way: the sump pump overflowed.

I guess I should buy a generator.

---

I didn't sleep well after that early-morning wake up. I kept having disorienting dreams about what was happening. I dreamed, several times, that the power had come back on -- only to wake and discover that it hadn't.

I dreamed that I was talking to neighbors that I'd just met in the dream, and telling them I'd decided to sell the house and move. "I'm sick of dealing with the basement. And I never did finish unpacking, so now I won't have to."

I dreamed one of my co-workers had set up for a garage sale the night before the storm, and left everything out and uncovered when it rained. I dreamed the basement flooded again. No, wait, that part really happened. I also wheeled the lawnmower back into the garage, through the rain, at 1:30 in the morning. It gave me something to do since I couldn't sleep anyway.

Tomorrow, I'll call the city and ask them when the work on the sewer will start, and what they plan to do around my house.

A Good Thing

On the bright side, my computer was unharmed by the repeated surges prior to the power outage, which is good because I hadn't done a new backup in a couple of months. ^.^;;

Funny. The last two months' worth of Prophecy writing represents maybe 40 hours of work, if that. And having written it once already, writing it down again would probably take even less time.

Whereas it would take me a few hundred hours at my Toddler Bank job to pay for a drainage system in the basement

Yet the thought of spending all that money to fix the basement is far less troubling to me than the thought of having to re-write the last several chapters of Prophecy.

I'll go make that backup now.