My Blog! My Blog!

Regular readers of this LiveJournal may recall that, last year, I started to have occasional trouble with water leaking into my basement. A friend gave me a pair of cute plastic frog-shaped devices that contain moisture sensors, so we'd at least have a warning if the water invaded again. They're known as "Leak Frogs."

For most of the past 24 hours, we have had snow, sleet, freezing rain, and rain in Malvern. Which means... you guessed it.

This morning, at 4 a.m., the Leak Frogs sang. esrblog bounded (okay, slowly and grumpily rolled) out of bed to figure out which electronic device in the house was emitting sounds of distress. (At first, he thought that one of our UPSs had given up the ghost.) Eventually he checked the basement, discovered that it was the Leak Frogs, put down a bean-bag-like device we keep around for soaking up minor spills, and came back to bed.

Four hours later, I went into the basement to clean Sugar's litter box, and saw to my chagrin that the small amount of moisture esrblog had reported had blossomed into a large puddle that had soaked the throw rug at the foot of the stairs and had formed a shallow but broad moat around the bean-bag thing. Fortunately, we have acquired a wet-dry vac since our last adventure with basement seepage, and I used the vac to suck up as much of the water as I could reach given the limits of the device's power cord.

It was still raining until about an hour ago, but I haven't been in the basement since. I'm telling myself that I'm waiting until we head out of the house this afternoon and can procure a suitable extension cord, but mostly it's cowardice.

Oh well. At least the Leak Frogs work.