Here we go again...stripes in the sky on Thursday evening, June 28, suggested that something ominous was about to happen. And it did. We had yet another round of stormy weather, including a deluge, strong winds, yada, yada, yada...

Dear Diary: Can we have a little less rain, please?

Please read this. . .

Dear Diary,

Well, Dear Diary, you are probably somewhat surprised to be getting this note. Mainly because, well, I don’t have a diary. Never have. 

Probably should have, though. That way, I would have a wealth of information to use in my upcoming Pulitzer Prize winning memoirs. By the way, once those are published, I will have to move.

Anyway, Dear Diary, I am writing to you mainly because I didn’t have my usual sounding board around for a while last week. 

The Other Half, you see, kind of flew the coop. She had to make a journey to the east as part of what has pretty much become part of our routine at this point in our lives. Oh, well. So it goes. And, so she goes.

To tell you the truth, Dear Diary, memories of a special event in our lives crossed through my simple little mind last Thursday night.

Perhaps you recall that special moment. I think it was in February. We had a deluge of almost Biblical proportions. I believe it was on a Saturday. 

Not only did it rain. As in rain really, really hard and heavy. The power also got knocked out. Losing power, in itself, is not such a bad thing. Happens fairly often in bad weather. 

The bad thing happens to be that we have a sump pump in the storm cellar which is under our humble abode. The sump pump depends on electricity to function properly. During that storm last February, our power went away. So, our sump pump could not function.

Oh, did I mention, Dear Diary, that it also rained really hard during that February storm? Yup.

Thanks to the combination of no power and no sump pump, The Other Half and yours truly got to spend a very special evening together, bailing water out of a hole under our house. Doesn’t get any better than that.

Or does it?

One day last week, we had another round of what seemed to be all-too-frequent storms and downpours during June. The rain came, in buckets. The power went away. The sump pump could not function.

This happened while yours truly was working with words and punctuation marks to create finely crafted paragraphs. 

Since I was on duty at The Paragraph Factory, the Other Half had to deal with bailing water out of the hole in the storm cellar by herself. She’s a trouper, a person who does whatever needs to be done. So, she did what she had to do. Fortunately, the power came back on after about an hour or so.

Bailing water in February. Bailing water in June. Bailing water two times was two times too many. 

Guess that makes the third time a charm, Dear Diary. ‘Cause it happened again. Last Thursday night. 

Yet another storm. Yet another deluge. Yet another power outage. And that meant that yours truly became a one-person bucket brigade.

I lost track of the number of buckets of water that I hauled up the stairs from the storm cellar. I am pretty sure that as time went on, the number of stairs somehow seemed to magically increase. 

Yours truly was one happy camper when the power returned. The power went away shortly after 8 p.m., and returned sometime after 10 p.m. I think. Honestly, I lost track of time in the dark.

Dear Diary, thank you for listening. I could have shared this with our cats, but we only tolerate each other. I can tell you that they were no help at all when it came to hauling water out of our hole in the storm cellar. I’m pretty sure that if they had gotten under the house, I’d still be trying to get them back out.

I’m also sorry that The Other Half wasn’t around, so we could have shared another very special, soaking wet, stair-climbing, bucket-emptying, working-in-the-dark-with-only-a-flashlight moment in our marriage.

Oh, just in case you are wondering, we have a plan to install an emergency backup power source for our sump pump. Hopefully, we might be able to get the work done before the next storm arrives. Not that it storms much in Southern Illinois.

 

The Gazette-Democrat

112 Lafayette St.
Anna, Illinois 62906
Office Number: (618) 833-2158
Email: news@annanews.com

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