Noah MacGyver

The basement flooded early this morning and somehow, thank God, the breaker tripped & shut off the power down there. It's the deepest I've seen it with still, dark, dirty standing water over the last step of the stairs. The hot water heater and the furnace are partially underwater, and with no power the sump pump isn't pumping water out to the flooded yard. Which is probably good, all things considered.

One of the causes of this round of flooding was a faulty downspout that poured a cascade of water right down on the ground beside the basement wall. I went out in the storm to take a look with the old anxious homeowner's eye and saw the problem, then spent half an hour in the downpour rigging up & monitoring a drainage system worthy of MacGyver. The junk in the garage yielded an old spice rack and a kids' inflatable swimming pool - the spice rack is now under the L bend of the downspout to send water shooting out away from the house into the deflated pool, which extends from the spout out to lower ground in the north yard. After a few minutes of that the north yard was under about 4 inches of water from the old garden area to the neighbor's yard.

That was round one, now over Indianapolis. Here comes round two, now over Peoria and heading east. Oh, and we're under a tornado watch and a severe thunderstorm warning:

Workforce anecdote

This bit from Glenn Reynolds reminded me of something. On our last trip to Indiana it was strange to see Anglo-Saxon-style Hoosiers doing outdoors work. Here in Illinois Mexicans do that sort of work outside the smaller towns. Why the difference?

Today's trek

Lotsa driving today. When Lisa returns from her physical therapy appointment, Sarah and I will head out across the wide flat prairie to Rantoul to make some deposits and open her first savings account. Then west over the northern reaches of the Sangamon River to the county clerk's office in downtown Decatur to get a copy of my birth certificate, which will be used on the north side of town to get a replacement Social Security card. Then Sam's Club for a few cheap bulk items and Aldi's for some other cheap stuff, then home.

Meanwhile I'll leave a large Mathematica program running at home, hoping that it will finally work. Programmers are professional optimists - "Surely it'll work this time!"

Also, I set up Haloscan comments and left a couple of test comments on the Rush in Manchester post, but the comment count is still zero. Grr.

Later. That was a long day! There were a few screwups along the way, either because we left in a rush without thinking through every detail or because I'm getting old and foggy.

There were two highlights of the trip. First was a visit to our old apartment in Rantoul (1100 Falcon Drive, Apt. 6). We lived there "in the Rantoul days", as the kids say: from July 1998, two months before Sarah was born, til January 2004 when she was about 5-1/2. She was deeply moved as she recalled how she and her brothers played in the back yard and under the tree in the front, and as we left she took some mementos: a wildflower from the yard, a stick and a brown autumnal leaf from the old tree out front, and in a last-minute impulse in the front yard she bent down and picked some blades of grass. She has a good heart.

On our way out of town we passed the Papa John's pizza joint from which we ordered many a meal in the Rantoul days. I promised her we'd look for one in Decatur and there it was on Route 51 - the second highlight of the trip! After a successful visit to the county clerk and Sam's (the SS office was already closed, the slackers) we stopped at Papa John's and ordered our old usuals. Their warm aroma filling the car brought back even more happy memories from the Rantoul days.

For the word mavens: is there a word for that quiet happy/sad reflection on personal history that hits when you visit "the old homestead" or somesuch?

Note to self: Aldi's margarine is about half the price per unit of Sam's.