So this past week, The Husband and I have been on vacation.
We've been playing lots of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Your character turns into a wolf and howls. IT'S AWESOME.
What's not awesome is that all week the basement's been flooding. The Cats are pissed: they come downstairs expecting to poop with impunity, and instead they can't get to the litter boxes because of the standing water. Tess screams about it constantly.
The funny thing to see is when the water's flowing into the office side of the basement, at the bottom of the stairs, and Jack comes down and sticks a paw in and OHMYGODITSWATER and he shakes his paw, and then you can almost literally see his brain reboot and then he sticks his paw back in and OHMYGODITSWATER and then he shakes his paw and then his brain reboots again and the process starts anew until you yell at him to stop.
Normally, he's the smart one.
So almost all week we headed downstairs--either right after we woke up or before we went to bed--to play catch-up with the accumulated water. All the towels in the house have been washed over and over. They smell like summer camp, all mildewy and outdoorsy. At first, we assumed the water was from all the rain we'd been getting: if the ground's saturated and it's raining non-stop or really hard for a short period of time, water will seep up through the basement floor. We think there are a couple of long cracks that are the culprits, although the whole floor could use a new coat of sealant. So as we mopped (well, as The Husband mopped and I looked at lolcats on the internet), we shook our fists at the sky and cursed the weather and figured we'd spend a weekend moving shit around and fixing the floor.
Then the Big Suck occurred.
I don't remember exactly how it happened, but The Husband was looking around the furnace, which was where most of the water was accumulating. We figured the floor underneath had never been sealed, hence the proliferation of water. I saw an insulated pipe that looked wet. The Husband looked at more pipes. I looked at more lolcats. Then, the EUREKA moment.
The Husband discovered that the air conditioner condenser thingie-mabobbie is leaking.
He jerry-rigged this awesome Man Contraption together, which was basically a trash bag duct-taped around part of the pipe, shaped into a funnel that drains into a bucket.
Which we have to empty every couple of hours the air conditioner's running.
This is the definition of suck. We don't have the money to get a new system, which is what most of the web sites suggest: buy a whole new fucking air conditioner/furnace setup. Which we should probably do anyway, because ours are both from the mid-80s. And most places have financing, which we could totally swing, but it would cut into our newly acquired Wii game buying expense.
Plus, I'm enrolled in my dream Intro to Popular Culture class this fall, which makes me orgasm every time I think about it. And I still have to pay the tuition for that.
But a little googling has alerted us to the fact that it may just be a clogged pipe, something a little hot water and bleach may take care of. So we're going to try that and see what happens.
Owning a house sucks ass.
You know what we should do? Move the computers upstairs to one of the bedrooms, and teach The Cats to swim. It's not like they couldn't do with a bath, the little stinkers.