Morning

The morning, post-breakfast ritual during this time of lockdown and isolation:

The Boy works on his schoolwork. We try to pace it: whatever’s going to be more challenging for the day we tackle first. Lately, things have been fairly balanced: everything has been much easier, in short. Still, old habits persist, and he’ll start fussing if he gets the slightest bit frustrated some mornings.

Today, we made it through everything fairly quickly with minimal fussing.

Papa often takes a nap. He doesn’t necessarily intend to take a nap — he’s just comfortable, full, content, watching television or listening to a book, and what else is there to do?

K works on emails for her real estate clients. She’s trying to work two jobs now. We all tell her that she needs to focus on one or the other. We know which one she’d like to focus on. We also know that that job doesn’t have a set pay schedule.

I am usually either helping the Boy or working on my own school work downstairs. Or as in this case, taking pictures.

The Girl — well, she does what a teenager does best.

Below

Ever since we had our first flood in the basement several years ago, a heavy rainfall makes me just a bit nervous. I look at the puddles forming in the backyard. I check the weather. I duck into the crawl space to look in the sump pump basin. I repeat the cycle. I worry, worry, worry. Until our big flood in February, I’d gotten to the point, though, that I really fretted very little. It had gotten a little wet but it hadn’t flooded flooded. Still, I’m always probably going to be a little worried about water coming up from below, the hydrostatic pressure building to the point that it forces water through the smallest of cracks and starts filling our basement again. It will happen. And though I have taken steps to remediate the situation, there are no more steps I can take that don’t involve massive work and a sizeable fiscal commitment.

Option 1

Our neighbor up the street had a drainage system put in his basement recently: around the entire parameter of the basement, workers busted up the concrete and the applied perforated drain pipes that lead to a central sump pump. It was a five-figure job.

That might be the next step if the basement continues flooding. It’s the type of job that, having the summer off every year, I’d be keen on tackling myself. At the very least, I could rent a jackhammer and bust up the concrete and dig down to the footer, cutting the cost significantly, I would think. Or at least hope.

Option 2

The other option: when we pull out the landscaping front of the kids’ bedrooms, I could dig down to the footer there and re-seal the foundation, perhaps installing a French drain system there while everything is dug up.

And Above

I was playing pool with a friend in the basement probably almost decade ago when water started pouring onto the pool table. It turned out that the shower pan in the master bathroom had failed.

Count Me Out, In

We ended up renovating the whole bathroom as a result.

There was one other time when the water came from above instead of below: somehow, the water came in between the upstairs deck and the door sill and started dripping from the top of the door in the basement. I never figured out what caused that, but I caulked well around the door and it never happened again.

But most of our experience with water entering the house comes from below.

But tonight, the Boy was getting ready for his bath when he looked up and asked, “Daddy, is that a leak?”

Shit.

I went to get a chair so I could reach up and feel the dampness I knew would be there. Still, as I walked to the Boy’s room and returned with the chair, I found myself thinking, “Please, oh please just be a dark spot on the ceiling that I’ve never noticed though we’ve lived here almost thirteen years.”

I looked carefully at where the stain was and realized quickly what had likely happened: the roof vent flashing had somehow failed. Perhaps it had gotten cracked. Perhaps it was torn. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

“Maybe it’s just running down the sewer vent,” I thought.

I climbed on the roof to see if anything was amiss. “Perhaps the hail we had a few days ago damaged something and insurance will pay for an entire re-roofing job,” I thought both hopefully and sickeningly. Examining the flashing, I couldn’t see any sign of compromise. We covered it with some plastic and hoped for the best.

Still, I needed to check in the attic to see just how bad the problem was.

I don’t really know if that’s bad or not. Part of me says, “That’s horrible: it’s bad enough that it’s saturated the ceiling sheetrock enough to make a stain.” And yet, I really don’t know.

So tomorrow we’ll call the insurance adjuster and a roofer to see what they say.

When I got back down and talked to K about what I found, the Boy discovered my boots and couldn’t resist.

Later in the evening, K thought the spot is damper than it was earlier. We decided to go all out: we brought out the two tarps we use for camping, overlapping one with the other so that water can run under the tarp, weighing the whole thing down with bricks and cinder blocks. And doing all this in a light rain. At 10:30.

Lightroom Revisit

In August 2003, K and I rode our bikes south through Slovakia to Hungary to spend a week in Budapest. When we returned, we rode to Sturovo, a town in southern Slovakia, where we caught a train to Zilina, where we waited for another train to Trstena, just across the border from where we lived in southern Poland. We had to wait in the Zilina train station for most of the night to catch the 5:00 a.m. train to Trstena. This guy was waiting for a train, too.

This is one I’m particularly pleased with the Lightroom reworking. The before-and-after shows how much of a difference it makes to do selective editing: