Spring Break So Far, or, I Am MacGuyver Now

Technically, this week is my spring break at my MA program. I'm still working for my job, of course, although I took a half-day Monday and had to work somewhat weird hours on Tuesday because my basement flooded and my hot water and heat got turned off. At the time it was sort of exciting actually but now I'm more or less exhausted. At least today was beautiful and I got to take a long walk with a good friend who I hadn't seen in a while. The story of how I fixed the basement is actually pretty hilarious, so I will tell it to you.

Every year our basement floods a little bit, an inch or two near the front of the house and just damp near the back. Everything we care about is up a few inches off the floor for this reason. After the first time (which sucked) we learned to deal with it, no problem, whatever. We did not, however, buy a pump. We rent, and figured that was our landlord's job, and besides what do we care, we can just wear galoshes to do our laundry. We --- well, maybe I shouldn't speak for everyone who's lived here over the last five years. I, at least, am the sort of person who likes to solve problems by routing around them whenever possible. 

Monday morning, eredien  announced that there was no hot water, and I said... hmm! I went to check the hot water heater before heading off to work and, well, it was submerged in six inches of water. Oh dear. I decided to work from home and monitor the situation, eredien  went to work after calling the landlord, lutris  fled the state for unrelated reasons, postrodent  was a darling and took out the trash for me, and doma  and I started trying to figure out how to solve this problem. At the time, I was on a ridiculous conference call with a customer who was like "Yes, please wait twenty minutes," and so I decided to spend the twenty minutes working on this whole, you know, no hot water thing. None of us, including the landlord, could find anywhere in the area that would sell us a sump pump, because, well, everyone's basement was flooding. Stores would pick up the phone and say things like "Home Depot, we do not have any sump pumps."

Eventually the fire department came by and turned the gas off entirely, but not the power, and made a suggestion --- if we were enterprising, we could probably hook up a bilge pump for a boat. I called up Russo's Marine in Medford, and it turned out that they had one bilge pump in stock, but it had no power supply, just wires coming off of it. "Whatever," I said. "I went to MIT! doma  went to MIT! Surely we can figure this out." We drove, carefully avoiding any roads with valleys, and obtained the pump from this giant store full of large powered boats. Walking into a completely dry boat showroom out of a deluge is actually really hilarious. (And I was dressed for basement spelunking, in ruined purple keds with my pants rolled up to the knees. I am surprised they let us in.)

Back at home, sitting at the dining room table, I realize "Shit, I don't actually know the first thing about how to do this." And immediately I block this thought. See, the way my brain works --- if I let myself think that I am not able to do something, I won't be able to do it, and I will be miserable. But as long as I believe that I am capable of doing something, I usually can, even if the thing is ridiculous and hard or scary. So I grab this motor and some random parts and wires and electrical tape and say "Okay! I can do this!" I asked some friends online for help, all of whom disagreed with each other in a hilarious but useful way, and cherrypicked advice like how to merge wires and what to use as a 12V power source and how to deal with the fact that the bilge pump's output didn't correspond to any hose I had. I could have done it without them, eventually, but a chat room full of nerds is both more efficient and funnier than straight-up googling things.

So here's what I did: I took the pump, and stripped the wires a bit, and attached them with electrical tape to a speaker cable that was extra in the media room. Then, to make sure the wires didn't get water in them, I duct taped a cardboard box that had previously held a Christmas ornament my aunt made for me in like 2003 to the top of the bilge pump, and duct taped the electrical taped wires to that. Then I connected the end of the speaker wires to jumper cables to the battery of doma 's running car. (If nothing else, a car is a very inefficient backup generator. If I were to do this again, I would have spent the extra hour figuring out how to use an AT power supply instead, so I could have plugged this into a wall and not had to hold jumper cables while standing in the rain.) When the hose didn't fit, I held it tightly in place, wrapped a bunch of electrical tape around it, and then wrapped a bunch of duct tape around that. Then, we stood out in the rain holding the jumper cables in place and watched the basement slowly drain. It was awesome. Eventually the duct tape hose seal failed but not until the water was low enough that the landlord could turn on the gas and we could at least boil water for tea. Unfortunately the hot water heater had to dry out before we could get the pilot light on.

Monday night a friend offered me a real pump and I set that up on Tuesday morning and basically finished draining the basement before the landlord even got there. He finished off the rest with a wet-dry vac (he still hadn't managed to find a pump) and got our heat back on. The hot shower I took at around 4 PM was amazing.

....and of course, none of this is my thesis. :) But right now, I am going to bed.