We had a big ice storm rip through The 716 the night before, and it had the usual effects of ice storms: thick coatings of ice on everything, resulting in tons of power outages from lines collapsing, or tree branches collapsing onto lines, and so on. We were without power at home for thirteen hours, starting about 1am Thursday morning. Luckily I slept through a chunk of that, and then I went to work, so when I got home the power was back on.
Oh, and that modification I made a few months back to our back-up sump pump? It worked! My extra-long pipe discharged the water far enough away from the house that for most of the outage we avoided the recirculation problem and thus the backup was actually able to cycle, rather than run continuously. Eventually, however, that amount of water still started making its way back in, so I added the other ten-foot length. And even that eventually wasn’t able to discharge the water far enough away to keep it from making its way back into the pit, so we’ll need to make a permanent fix at some point and tie the backup sump discharge into the main storm line. That’s a problem for another time, though.
Meanwhile, the landscape itself after the ice storm took on a quality we don’t see all that often, since we don’t get ice storms like this too frequently. Some of the trees started to look like something out of Doctor Zhivago. And everything sounded differently, too! I actually thought to record some of this, hence the video below. First, my feet, stomping not through snow but a thick crust of ice. Second, removing the ice shell–more than 1/4-in thick–from the railings of our deck. And third, from late last night, when I went to let Carla out for her last bit of outdoor business before bedtime. It sounded like it was pouring out, and she tried to come right back in, but I gritted my teeth and stepped out with her…to discovered it wasn’t pouring or raining or anything at all. That was the ice in the trees, breaking through and raining down.
I’m not a fan of ice storms, but they do make the world look and sound very different….
I’m sure we all know by now that former President Jimmy Carter is accepting hospice care, rather than continuing to seek treatment for various health issues. Carter is 98 years old; he was elected President over 46 years ago, and he left office over 42 years ago. Carter’s presidency did not go smoothly, but his post-Presidency has been amazing to behold as he has tirelessly championed democracy and other humanitarian causes for decades since leaving office. I expect the historical verdict on Jimmy Carter will likely remain some variant of “Not a great President, but a great man nonetheless.”
Jimmy Carter is the first political figure of whom I was genuinely aware, although admittedly with a very immature understanding of anything at all. I remember hearing about him from my kindergarten teacher and thinking “A peanut farmer wants to be President! Cool!” I had no idea what a “President” was; I vaguely recall asking one of my parents that very question, and getting a response that “He’s the boss for the whole country.” I pictured someone like my school’s principal, going all over the country telling people what to do.
President Carter also angered me as a young sci-fi geek when he chose the evening of ABC’s broadcast of the premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica for the signing of the Camp David Accords. I mean, when you’re a kid sitting down to watch a highly-hyped teevee show with explodey-spaceshippy goodness, nothing throws you into a state of infuriation quite like the screen going dark and suddenly the words “ABC NEWS SPECIAL REPORT” coming on. I’ve made my peace with this more recently, though. (“Harumph,” though, says my inner 7-year-old.)
All was forgiven, though, just a couple of weeks later. At this time we were living for a year in Elkins, WV, and the town’s annual festival, the Mountain State Forest Festival, was coming right up, in early October. That year we learned that President Carter himself was coming to Elkins to walk in the parade. We were in the stands along the main street that day, and finally, after what felt like hours (it might have actually been hours), the parade began, and suddenly, there he was: the President of the United States himself, walking in the street and waving, beaming that famous smile of his. Then he climbed into his limousine and I thought “That’s it?” But up he popped from the sun roof, waving some more. Not long after he was gone. I actually found the President’s briefing book from that day–apparently he gave a campaign speech that morning for one of WV’s senators, before driving in the parade–and by late afternoon, he was back at Camp David. I also found these two photos from that day:
Looking at this, I can’t believe how close those spectators were allowed to get to the President!Not sure if the guy in the tan overcoat is a Secret Service guy or not; he kind of looks like Hamilton Jordan, President Carter’s White House Chief of Staff.
To this day, President Carter remains the only US President I have ever actually seen. The closest I’ve come since? A campaign rally in Erie for Michael Dukakis in 1988, and a couple of times when Presidents Bush the Younger and Obama flew into Buffalo, and I saw Air Force One from the parking lot of The Store.
Anyway, best wishes to President Carter as he begins this journey with as much grace as he seems to have pursued all of his previous journeys.
So, America’s right-wing has been complaining about an AI chat-bot gizmo the last day or two. Why? Because someone got the idea to hit the AI chat-bot gizmo with a hypothetical situation: there’s a ticking time bomb and when it goes off it will kill millions! But it can be defused by simply calling it a racial slur.
So much of what passes for “outrage” nowadays is purely manufactured outrage. It’s people not being actually outraged by something outrageous, but rather choosing to be outraged at something they have interpreted through tortured logic into something outrageous.
I have an actual example of this that I remember from my college years.
I was a Philosophy major, and we often delved into some very esoteric topics; and like any group of people studying the esoterica of a given field, we occasionally invented jokes that were probably the extreme version of “You had to be there.” One such bit of philosophy humor came in my Senior year, when I took “Contemporary Analytic Philosophy.” This class was devoted to the Philosophy of Language, as shaped by figures like Bertrand Russell in the early 20th century. Without getting too deep in the weeds here, one issue we discussed was the relationship between words and meaning: do words have inherent meaning, or do they only mean what we decide they mean? Putting this as a thought experiment: Just after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a week old, did the word cat still mean the four-legged beast we all know?
Yeah, I get it. Esoteric stuff. Boring, even, if you’re not a kinda-sorta wannabe 21-year-old intellectual.
But a friend and I decided that there should be a word that has no meaning. None. And not in the sense that “it can mean what you want it to mean!”, like a linguistic wild-card: the word has no meaning. Any time you utter this word, you have expressed no meaning at all. It’s like a linguistic version of the empty set.
The word we coined? Phneh.
We thought this was the funniest thing. We actually spread this around our circle, as only college kids can do. We discussed how even the linguistic representation of Phneh was unable to truly capture the meaninglessness of Phneh, which we illustrated through a notion ripped from Zen: “The finger pointing at Phneh is not Phneh itself.”
Look, you had to be there, OK?
It was all fun and games of the pseudo-intellectual sort until I took a marker, scrawled Phneh on a piece of paper, and stuck it on the bulletin board in the student lounge of the music building.
People would see it and say, “What is that?” And I’d explain the concept. Most people got it and if they didn’t see the goofball 4th-year Philosophy student humor of it, they at least went “Oh, OK” and wandered off, ignoring it.
One guy, however, did not.
This guy got really bothered by Phneh.
Like, really bothered by it.
It just annoyed the shit out of him that I would dare put a piece of paper with a meaningless word up on the bulletin board. So he started tearing it down.
I, of course, seeing an opportunity to take jabs at an easily-annoyed person’s tender spot, kept right on putting our meaningless word back up on the bulletin board, and he kept tearing it down. I figured he’d get bored with the whole thing–by this point the joke had likely well exceeded its sell-by–but not only did he not get bored with his fight against a meaningless word that had literally just been made up a month or two before by a couple of philosophy dweebs, he actually ratcheted it up. He started posting hand-written warnings of his own about the improper use of the bulletin board; then one day he showed up in the lounge with his girlfriend’s laptop (this was 1993, when laptops weren’t anywhere near ubiquitous, so to show up someplace and use one visibly was mostly showing off at that point) to type up a Very Official Memorandum in which he cited some actual shit from some college rulebook someplace about the use of bulletin boards and the required permission needed to post anything at all.
At this point some other folks were starting to think he was making an ass of himself; one person asked, “So unless we have official permission, I can’t post something about a party my housemates and I are hosting next Friday?” or “Do I hafta take down my ‘available for tutoring’ notice?” And he’d offer mealy-mouthed justifications as to why those were OK but Phneh was not. It was plainly obvious that his weird crusade, now being carried out under some kind of quasi-official (at least in his own head) banner, was directed at one thing and one thing only.
Eventually, though, someone asked him the money question. It might have even been me that asked, but I don’t recall, honestly. But someone did ask him: “If it’s a meaningless word, why are you so bothered by it?”
His response: “If it’s meaningless then I can interpret it as being offensive, which means it is offensive.”
That is, as near as I can recall, his verbatim response. And in all honesty, this response just stopped me in my tracks. I’ve never been a good verbal debater; I’m not often quick with a response, especially when the logic I’ve just been offered is so obviously bad that it takes me a bit of time just to wrap my head around the notion that someone has offered up their argument at all, much less processing all the ways it’s bad. All I could manage, when I recovered my wits enough, was to ask, “So…when you encounter something and you don’t know what it means, you first assume it’s ‘offensive’ until you learn otherwise?” He had a mealy-mouthed reply to this that I did not commit to memory.
Later on I related all of this to my former classmate with whom I had coined Phneh in the first place; in the meantime he had left that college to go to another that offered a drama program. When I told him this story, he laughed so hard I thought he was going to fall on the floor. He found the whole thing hysterical, and when he stopped laughing he said, “Why would you voluntarily offend yourself?”
That was really the heart of it, wasn’t it? The guy was offended, obviously. But equally obviously, he wasn’t offended by anything I had said or done, because there was literally no offense to be found there. He had manufactured his offended state, all by himself. All I gave him was the impetus to get offended, but I gave him nothing to be offended about.
So yeah, that was my first experience with manufactured outrage. This guy in college got himself worked into a holy lather that he manufactured out of whole cloth, over a completely meaningless thing that I and a friend had in turn manufactured out of equally whole cloth. The whole episode was one of the weirdest damned things I remember from my college years. I am shaking my head in disbelief as I write this about it. That incident has, as the kids say these days, lived rent-free in my head since 1993.
But that really is what manufactured outrage is, isn’t it? It’s exactly like what all those right-wingers got all upset about last week when a computer program couldn’t be tricked into saying the N-word. It’s amazing how much gets decided, policy-wise, on the basis of manufactured outrage. And not just policy: in his book On Writing, at one point Stephen King discusses all the angry mail he got when an evil character in one of his novels killed a dog. And he’s thinking, “The guy is evil and he does evil things, it’s kind of the whole point of that novel, and also, the guy isn’t real and the dog isn’t real!” (Bad example for me, maybe; for obvious reasons I am now much more sensitive to the fate of fictional dogs.)
So how did the whole Phneh crusade turn out? Well, I guess he won, because ultimately I got bored and moved on to other things and there’s only so much amusement to be gained from poking someone in their sensitive spot, even if the spot is only sensitive because they got up that morning and decided they were sensitive about it. But a few days after the last conversation about all this, the Music Building’s secretary expressed exasperation to me: “I shouldn’t have to field complaints from people about a nonsense word!” As if it was all my fault. (Well…maybe…but anyway) I responded, “Is it people, or is it one person? And you yourself just said it’s a nonsense word, so why are you taking the complaints seriously?” She didn’t have a good answer to that, either. But that’s when I decided to start hanging out someplace else for a while, having decided that maybe I shouldn’t wear out my welcome through use of a word that literally had no meaning.
It’s always worth asking ourselves, though, when we feel our outrage meter rising, “Is this a real thing that I should be getting outraged about?” Because the answer might well be, “No.”
Our next-door neighbors have taken to feeding the local deer from the woods behind our neighborhood. It’s nice to see them over there in their yard, eating away. Our Carla, of course, thinks they are Big! Scary! Beasts! that need to be shooed away with much barking, but I think they’re getting used to her because where she used to be able to scare them all off, now only a few go when she goes running out there. (Our yard is fenced, so she can’t actually get at the deer.)
(The photo’s resolution isn’t great because I used the 10x zoom on my phone, as opposed to the optical zoom on my good camera.)
For Christmas 1990, a friend of the family gave me…a toaster oven. I was in college, and this was a gift that had never once been on my radar as something I wanted or needed. But off to college it went, whereupon my room-mate at the time saw it. This exchange, or something like it, happened:
HE: A toaster oven? ME: Yup. HE: We have a toaster oven? ME: Yup. HE: Did we need a toaster oven? ME: Maybe? I mean, we can make toast now. HE: Is that something we’ve been missing until now? ME: Maybe it’s one of those things we didn’t know we were missing? HE: Huh….
Anyway, we set up the toaster oven. I don’t recall how much we used it at the time, in our dorm room (given we were college students, probably small cheap frozen pizzas), but it did become more useful the next year when we were living in a rented off-campus house.
That toaster oven lived through college, and then…it kept on going. And going. And going. It stopped serving that roommate and I, and eventually served The Girlfriend when she moved out to Western New York, and it served us both again when we got married and she became The Wife.
And this morning there it was, that old toaster oven, still in our kitchen. I made toast in it just this morning.
But…this is the last day for that old toaster oven. Thirty-two years of a toaster oven. I’d say I got our old family friend’s money’s worth out of that toaster oven.
Now, why is it the last day for that toaster oven? Well, we’re upgrading. What to? Well…that’ll be a post for later this week, I hope!
(oooh, wait! A random memory of my grandmother’s toaster. I don’t know if it was specifically a toaster oven, but it looked like one. When you went to open it to put bread in it, the wire rack would actually slide out at you, and when the toast was done the door would open and the wire rack would pop out to give you your toast. That, for six-year-old me, was magic. A lot cooler than those boring toasters where you drop your bread in through the top….)
And it is time at last for my annual quiz-retrospective on the year just ending. Let me be honest here, folks: 2022 was, for the most part, pretty much of a struggle. It felt like the kind of year where I started to feel things not so much ending, but starting to get chipped away, bit by little bit. I hope that’s not how most years are going to feel, moving forward.
Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
“Read a lot, write a lot, live healthier.” I did OK by those, to be honest. I try to keep my “resolutions” realistic and in keeping with the life I’m already trying to live, after all.
Did anyone close to you give birth?
No.
Did anyone close to you die?
Oh, yes.
What countries did you visit?
Another year of never leaving the USA…but we are hoping to visit Toronto in 2023!
What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?
A whole lot less knowledge of Elon Musk.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
This was one of those years where “getting through it” was an achievement in itself. But I did finally get the first draft of Forgotten Stars V done, which is a thing.
Probably my newest laptop (described here). And as always, I bought a lot of lovely jewelry for The Wife.
Whose behavior merited celebration?
American voters who stood up to say that maybe this “democracy” thing still has life in it yet.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
American right-wingers and Republicans. At some point these people have to return to Earth, don’t they?
Where did most of your money go?
Same as always: Books, booze, food, gifts, vintage overalls, some other nifty clothing items, gifts for family and a few friends, and a trip with The Wife to the Finger Lakes.
What did you get really excited about?
That trip to the Finger Lakes!
Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
Well…yeah. Definitely sadder. Not by much, but 2022 was not a year that boasted happiness in great supply.
Thinner or fatter?
Very likely right about the same, maybe just a bit heavier. Higher hopes for a pivot back in the right direction soon, though!
Richer or poorer?
A little richer. Not much, but a little. Which isn’t bad these days, considering.
What do you wish you’d done more of?
Honestly, reading and writing. External factors contributed to a number of slumps in both areas this year. I’m determined in 2023 to push both of those back the other way.
What do you wish you’d done less of?
Worrying about things.
How did you spend Christmas?
Well…due to the Big Storm that hit The 716 from December 23 until December 27, it was a tough Christmas to get through. We never lost power and were safe and warm, but it’s hard to relax and focus when the wind outside sounds like a freight train for 48 hours straight. Someone asked me at work this week how my time off was (I took six days of time off for Christmas), and I replied: “The parts of it that were Christmas were absolutely lovely and a joy. The parts of it that weren’t Christmas were stressful as hell.” I stand by that.
Did you fall in love in 2022?
How could I not?
How many one-night stands?
Pshaw!
What was your favorite TV program?
Abbott Elementary is a delight (even if I’m tiring a bit of the “mockumentary in a workplace” genre), as is Ghosts (which may supplant Newhart on my rankings of shows about quirky couples who buy an inn someplace and have to deal with the really weird locals). But the best teevee we watched this year are the Canadian comedies Letterkenny and its spinoff Shoresy. We are actually rewatching all of Letterkenny right now, less than a year after we started watching it the first time.
Oh, and a shout-out to a couple of wonderful Netflix competition shows: Blown Away, which is a competition about glass-blowing, and Drink Masters, which is a competition about mixology. These are interesting shows, beautifully made, in which you learn a lot of stuff. As Hell’s Kitchen more and more phones it in every year, I like these new shows a great deal.
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
A year ago I didn’t know shit about Elon Musk. How I wish that was still the case.
What was the best book you read?
In no particular order:
Happenstance, Steven Frug Ballad for Sophie, Felipe Melo All the Seas of the World, Guy Gavriel Kay
What was your greatest musical discovery?
I spent some time exploring the sound-world of composer Alfred Schnittke, who wrote some fascinating music!
What did you want and get?
We got a new air-fryer/convection oven! Next: clearing out a space and setting it up. Cool! Oh, and the afore-mentioned new laptop, which continues to be a delight to use after the honestly-annoying performance of my last Dell laptop.
Oh, and how could I forget? A car! (Which may not qualify, as I didn’t exactly want a new car at the time, but I wasn’t unhappy with that purchase, either.)
Also, I started up a newsletter! But there are some more recent developments regarding Revue, my chosen newsletter platform…and I’ll write about that soon, once I’ve ironed out what’s going on. (Short version: Revue is owned by Twitter, and since Elon Musk sucks, Twitter is killing Revue.)
What did you want and not get?
Competence from many political figures. I’ll leave it at that.
Oh, and if we’re keeping track, I did not get pied this year!
What were your favorite films of this year?
We watched a lot of movies that left zero impression on me, I have to say; in a lot of cases it’s a struggle just to remember what hell we actually watched. We enjoyed Crazy, Stupid, Love a bit, and also To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. Enola Holmes 2 was an absolute delight. Most recently we loved Stay the Night, which I chose on recommendation by Sheila O’Malley, so that one might be the winner…although technically, the year is not out, and tonight we’re planning to watch Glass Onion, the sequel to Knives Out, so…this answer may be subject to change!
What did you do on your birthday?
As usual, not much actually on my birthday, but a few days later we made our annual trip to Ithaca for the Apple Harvest Festival (our first one since 2019, actually). As this was just a few weeks after we lost Cane, there were a lot of bittersweet feelings along the way.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2022?
My approach now seems to be “What else can I wear with overalls?” This year, I found linen shirts to be a joy.
As for overalls specifically, I finally gave in and added Liberty brand overalls to the collection, and since then I’ve wondered why I waited so long. Currently I only have the Hickory-striped pair, so I may be looking to add a blue pair at some point.
What kept you sane?
Books and music and dogs and cats and overalls. Also, good food and, yes, rum.
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
We haven’t seen Avatar 2 yet, but I really do admire James Cameron’s approach to this project: “I’m going to do what I want to do, in the way I want to do it, and if it takes me a dozen years, so be it.”
What political issue stirred you the most?
Keeping democracy, and more recently, restoring competence to local government.
Who did you miss?
Cane. That one’s going to be a “forever” one, I suspect.
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2022:
Leaving last year’s answer intact:
Read a lot, write a lot. Listen to music. Go for walks and look at sunsets. Take all the pictures you want. Learn new things and try new stuff. If you have a dog, take him for walks. Buy books for your daughter, even when she complains that she likes to pick her own books (let her do that, too). Nothing fits your hand so well as your lover’s hand. Eating out is fine, but learn to cook things, too. Have a place to go where they know you and what you order. Don’t be afraid to revisit your childhood passions now and again; you weren’t always wrong back then. Overalls are awesome, it’s OK to wear double denim, and a pie in the face is a wonderful thing!
To this I’d add: The United States of America desperately needs to re-embrace rational and collective thinking, and ditch its mythologies about rugged individualism and the eternal wisdom of “the Founders”.
And, via Letterkenny: “More hands makes less work!”, and “Pitter-patter, let’s get at ‘er!”
If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:
If you have a blog or other online writing forum, share some of your favorite work from this year:
This song doesn’t sum up my year at all! But I first heard it this year, courtesy the wonderful Letterkenny. It’s by a band called Toulouse, which seems like Canada’s answer to ABBA back in the late 70s and early 80s. I listen to this song a lot. The best songs really shape themselves to our lives, don’t they?
Oh, and it’s mostly in French. And I don’t think it matters one bit.
Comme un été, comme une image Je sens que tout va recommencer Hier, l’hiver, je me suis ennuyée Je ne savais vraiment plus quoi faire
Baby, oh my baby Je crois que j’ai trouvé l’amour Baby, oh my baby I think I’m falling in love
(Baby)
Comme un vautour qui tourne autour Tu t’envoles avec mon amour Tu m’as laissé, tu m’as oublié C’est toujours à recommencer
Oh baby, oh my baby Je crois que je t’aimerais toujours Oh oh oh baby, oh my baby You know it always happens this way
Oh oh oh oh baby, oh my baby Je crois que je t’aimerais toujours Baby, oh my baby Je crois que j’ai perdu l’amour
Baby, oh my baby I think I’m falling in love Oh oh baby, oh my baby You know it always happens this way
Oh baby, oh my baby Je crois que je t’aimerais toujours Oh oh baby, oh my baby Je crois que j’ai perdu l’amour
Oh oh baby, oh my baby
I thought about posting just the song above, but I went with the actual Letterkenny clip because I think–even if you haven’t seen the show at all–the choreography and character work in the clip stands out. This scene may well be when this show turned the corner for me from being a good and funny show to something much more than that.
And with that, I bring this to a close…and my blogging efforts for 2022. I hope 2023 is better, for everyone! Especially you. That’s right, you.
That was a three-day stretch to remember. And we didn’t even get the brunt of it this time.
I honestly don’t recall a previous time when we lived under an official blizzard warning. Winter weather, winter storms, sure…but an actual according-to-Hoyle blizzard? Nope. So that’s off the list of, well, somebody’s list, anyway. It wasn’t on mine.
In our neck of the 716, we actually did not take this one on the chin, like we do on most events that include a significant lake-effect component (such as, oh, last weekend…and the big one from six weeks ago). As I write this it’s 1:45pm on Christmas Day and we’re getting hit by the northern edge of the snow band which spent most of the last two days absolutely drilling Buffalo and the northern suburbs, before it finally moved south overnight (giving us another foot as it passed by) and then shifted north again about 90 minutes ago.
I’m long on record as loving winter and snow, but this winter has thus far been a pretty severe test of those convictions.
But we’re still alive and well, we have plenty of food and thus far we haven’t lost power, and we frankly are in a much better situation than many. We’re doing OK. In fact, aside from my having to suit up and do a bit of shoveling every six hours or so (just a bit of maintenance shoveling, keeping the furnace vents cleared and making sure Carla has access to someplace to relieve herself, actually digging out the cars can wait, and why not, there’s a county-wide driving ban so we couldn’t go anywhere if we wanted to!), it’s actually been a lovely Christmas thus far.
But for a lot of people in my region it’s been a cold and dark and stressful and worrisome Christmas. I hope they come out of this and find a chance for some joy at some point. This was just nasty.
The title of this post has been in my head for years. I think it came from a comic strip years ago…For Better or For Worse, maybe….
Anyway, let’s talk sump pumps.
Well, not quite. It’s more a drainage thing.
When we moved into this house, the sump pumps on both sides of the duplex needed replacing, and we got it done. At the time there was a back-up sump system that was battery powered, but the guy who replaced the main pumps switched out that system with a back-up called SumpJet, which is powered by the municipal water supply. Both pumps reside in the pit, with the main electrical pump doing its thing periodically as normal. But if the main pump doesn’t work–usually because of a power outage–a float attached to the back-up pump rises, and when it gets high enough, it opens a valve which allows municipal water to flow through a dedicated line, and as that stream passes the pump, the speed of the water moving through a valve creates a pressure differential that the pump uses to suck water up and out of the pit.
No, I do not entirely understand the physics there. It’s called a Venturi Effect, I think.
But we had a problem with drainage.
The plumber back then (whom we don’t use anymore, because he re-focused his business) actually dug up and replaced all of our storm drain lines, and he connected the main sump pump directly to that storm drain, so that water just goes all the way away. The back-up, unfortunately, he set up to simply discharge right outside the house. This, it turns out, was the wrong thing to do; if you discharge your sump water right by the side of your house, the water sinks right down the side of the foundation to find its way right back to the sump pit. Not only is this bad for your foundation, but rather than evacuating water completely, the back-up pump ends up running continuously as it is now actually recirculating water, not removing it.
That recirculating did result in a minor bit of basement flooding one time, when the power was out long enough that the pit accumulated more water than the back-ups could vacate. Eventually we got the back-up pump on my parents’ side connected to the storm drain on their side, but the one on our side still discharges incorrectly.
That is, until now!
Here’s the discharge set-up in a kinda-sorta “before” shot. I say “kinda-sorta” because I didn’t think to take a photo before I cut the drain pipe. The piece lying on the ground was a part of that truncated pipe, and you can see here that the water discharged right there, just inches from the foundation.
What I did was pretty simple: I cut the pipe and then I used a flexible coupling to attach a ten-foot length of PVC to the discharge, so now if the back-up pump operates, the water will be dumped ten feet from the house. Here’s the new set-up:
I really hope this works. I don’t want to have a power outage to find out, but…well, the weather report seems to indicate that this is a particular weekend where I really want to have this particular repair in the rear-view mirror. We’ll get this fixed “correctly” some day, probably in spring or summer, but for now I’m hoping this leads to some peace of mind.
(What’s funny about sump pumps is that I never thought of them at all until we lived in a house that has one. I swear sump pumps were invented by a cruel sadist.)
