into every happy life a little rain must fall….

and flood the basement.  yep, we woke up this morning to discover that, once again, one of our three sump pumps failed in the middle of the night, allowing water to flow throughout our basement.  it’s been worse.  this time, there were at least some dry spots and it wasn’t ankle deep anywhere.  i didn’t get any pictures of the water (had higher priorities than recording it–namely, getting rid of it as quickly as possible) but here’s a nice shot of our attempts to dry the carpet:

once we figured out which sump pump was not doing its job and that it wasn’t just a flipped breaker or something simple, mr. happy stuff (who, wasn’t really all that happy–he was supposed to be playing in a frisbee tournament today) went to the home depot to buy a new sump pump.  he said that sump pumps were a pretty popular item this morning.  apparently, one of the employees was just parked in that aisle, with a stool  to help reach stuff on top shelves, cup of coffee in hand, ready for the flood of flooded homeowners.  sadly, mr. h-s had to see this man twice because the first pump he bought wasn’t the right one.  both trips, he saw quite a number of people making similar purchases.  one of the men said that this was the first time his basement had ever flooded and that this afternoon, he was hosting his parent’s 40th wedding anniversary at his home (at least partially in his basement). mr. h-s also purchased a few “water alarms” that sound an alarm when standing water appears on the floor.  brilliant!  let’s hope we never have occasion to hear them, but if we do, then at least we’ll hopefully catch the water before it reaches the carpet (and the laptop and the pool table and…).
let’s see…. this blog is supposed to be happy stuff, so where’s the happy in all of this?  that it didn’t happen on one of the weekends that we were out of town!