random thoughts – Day 1,374 – (Thursday) – interval training

It has been a hella-week.  

Last Thursday, the evening peace and quiet was shattered by pop- pop ... pop-pop-pop-pop and I, in my living room, thought why the hell are idiots shooting fireworks now? But it wasn’t fireworks. It was gun shots, directed at the Nuisance House across the street. It was followed by at least two hours of police car lights and flashlights and loud conversations in the street including such tidbits as “I know who it was – well, not their names, but I know the faces.” Ugh.

Waterworld..

The weekend felt quietly normal but Monday delivered the rain/wind storm with a power outage that lasted 24 hours and 24 minutes on my street. Tuesday had the split personality of no power/have power, the 45 minute drive two miles to work, and screwed up traffic and general weirdness. Wednesday had the overworked sump pump and water covering the basement floor. Thursday was frenetic attention to things that needed to be done at work  followed immediately by home-based interval fitness training. 

The interval training was kind of exciting. For a  minute anyway. It involved rushing downstairs to the basement, manually resetting the sump pump, and pushing water with a broom from the perimeter of the room to the sump pump hole.  

During the work day this occurred approximately every hour. After work it was every 15 minutes. There was the resetting of the pump and, because I was already downstairs, pushing water to the sump pump hole with the specially designated basement broom before resetting the pump again. Who needs a gym when the water table is high?  Also, fuck you climate issues and high water table.

The source of the exterior water table angst is the extra-high level of Beaver Brook after the late-fall edition of monsoon season. The interior water angst is the messed up rusted narrow pin that holds the sump pump floater ball which clearly needs replacement. But how do you buy a single metal rod that allows the floater ball to rise and fall? You can’t. It doesn’t exist. You need an entire new sump pump system, starting at $249 at the local Big Box hardware store. It might be possible to McGyver it with a wire hanger (or some other solution), but wire hangers were replaced at The BungaLowell years ago by wooden hangers and while there are random art supplies, hardware is another game altogether.

So there I was, every fifteen minutes, staring and swearing at a floater ball on a rusty metal rod in a pool of water. It won’t rise and it won’t fall. The water just collects around it. The ball floats sideways. The connecting lever is pushed down by hand. The interval training takes place with the pushing of water via broom from the far edges of the basement towards the sump pump hole. Every fifteen minutes. This is measured data, not poetic license like when I say a “gazillion” to indicate “a lot, but I’m too lazy to get an actual amount, so I’ll use some fantastical amount.”

Bright side – the 15-minute interval training was probably physically beneficial and might make up for blowing off the gym for at least one day of the past several weeks. Well, except for where it feels like I pulled a muscle in my boob. That might require medical attention. Pushing water with a broom is hard. And water can be evil.