FINALLY! This past weekend, a few red-winged blackbirds finally came home to the marsh! Surely this means that spring is just around the corner! All we need is a few spring peepers and some fireflies, and it's springtime for Delia!
We're certainly having some spring showers here, along with warmer temperatures, that are causing some major flooding all around the area, including my basement:
That's four inches of water in the basement, which means my laundry room and my workshop in addition to a big room where the furnace and oil tank (and a bunch of other crap) are. The flooding shorted out the motor in the furnace, so I woke up to NO HEAT.
This melting snow and tons of rain are really making life difficult. I had to get the furnace guy to come and dry out (literally--with my blowdryer) the motor in the furnace, and we had to call another guy with a big pickup and a chain to pull the car out of the mud at the bottom of the driveway:
I've discovered that the washing machine still works, but the dryer does not. I'm hoping it is just drying itself out and I'll be able to put that freshly washed load into it soon... I hope?
Needless to say, no work for me today. Instead, I spent the day getting the car towed about four feet for $25 (other people wanted over $100!), buying a submersible pump to get the water out of the basement (another $75, but hey--we saved that on the towing!), pumping the water out of the big basement and the small basement (we have two separate basements under two different sections of the house), waiting for the furnace guy to get the heat back on (I'm only now thawing out from not having heat all night and most of the day), making some really yummy potato-leek soup, putting floated-away stuff back in place in the basement, washing clothes but not drying them, and finally settling in for a quick episode or two of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (I'm watching Season 3 right now).
After I'm done posting, I have to study for yet another calculus quiz tomorrow night. Oy vey. But let's not talk about that. Let's focus on the spring songs of the song sparrows and the oka-lee of the red-winged blackbirds! Welcome home, birdies! (Sorry no picture but it's still raining outside.)
