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Last week, it rained for 36 hours straight, some of it a screaming downpour.

During the screaming downpour, I looked out the window and noticed that water was pouring over the sides of the gutter that runs across the front of my roof, and cutting a deep but narrow trench along the front of my house, on the side where we'd had the basement leakage.

I was prepared for trouble...but all we got was a modest bit of seepage near, but not at the same place as, the last puddles I'd had in my basement. No real puddle. This time.

So I called Contractor Guy again. He got back on the ladder and noted that my gutters were already jam-packed with leafy crap. Short of cutting down some of my trees, he suggested upgrading to a wider gutter--which is what I was going to request anyway. Stay tuned....

It rained for nearly 48 hours straight this weekend, so naturally I had water in my basement again.

Called Contractor Guy and told him. He has moved the work to be done at my place up in his queue as a result, and will be here tomorrow. Hopefully, he can do most of it before we get the snow they're predicting for tomorrow night.

I was in the basement just now, attempting to get the several gallons of water absorbed by my throw rugs *out* of the throw rugs, when I noticed that the floor way, way beyond the rug was wet! Horrors! Could this mean the water had encroached even farther than I thought?

It could have, but it didn't. Closer inspection shows that when the wet-dry vac I have is sucking water out of a rug, instead of slurping up actual puddles, it throws a spray of water *out the back vent*. The harder I was scrubbing the rug, the more I was sprinkling the tile behind me.

Whimper....

Shortly after my last post on the water in my basement, I went downstairs after all, to find that the puddle has spread to one of the throw rugs deeper into the middle of the basement, soaking about half of it.

This isn't intrinsically a bad thing. Our throw rugs in the basement are polypropylene, which means they were made to be hosed off periodically; getting wet won't hurt them a bit. But I don't like the thought of wet rugs lying on our tile floor, with the water slooowly seeping around the tile edges, gradually weakening the mastic.

Grrr. I need to call my favorite handyman and get waterproofing expert recommendations. Stat.

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.

Naturally, the weather at home conspired to make me regret I'd left Austin. It had rained about 3 days solid as of when we touched down in Pennsylvania, and was only beginning to let up. Worse, I got my car back with wet brakes *and* a wet driver's seat. The guy from the parking place tried to warn me, but his warning was so vague that by the time I realized he'd meant the driver's seat was soaked I had tipped him. I regret that, since it was probably his fault the seat got soaked in the first place. So I got to sit in a wet sponge for 45 minutes on the drive home, resolved that I will never deal with that particular parking facility again.

To make matters worse, the whistling our plumbing does when we flush the toilets or turn on the shower has gotten so loud as to be almost painful. It wasn't bad enough to have the Car Demon after me, now I've got the Water Demon coming for me too! Grrrr.