With a little reluctance ( focus Dorothy!!)I put that aside, still needing a new jack o lantern I took out the papier mache. This time I took the time to clearly define the features while it was still on the form. I did learn something new! And while that was drying I could work on the fish! My craft weekend was not lost after all.
Well plans changed..... we were told that at 4 pm on Saturday, all the homes in our neighborhood were being evacuated, this time it was mandatory. Our town does not flood, even though we are 1/2 mile from the water we are up on a hill. What does happen is the main road to get out floods in both directions. We would be trapped. We decided to stay anyway (we are such rebels!or stupid, depends on your perspective))figuring if something happened at home we would be there to take care of it or deal with it. And, it's a good thing we did. Sometime overnight the sump pump in the crawlspace decided it had enough and stopped working.
At about 6:30 Sunday morning John and I started emptying the crawlspace of about 8" of water. I had a bucket and he rigged up the wet/dry vac and pump. We took turns throughout the day sitting in the crawlspace manually turning on the vacuum, turning on the pump, waiting for the water to fill the sump enough to start the process all over again. We even started timing the fill ups to see if it was taking longer, see if the water would ever stop!
After 2 attempt to get to our local hardware store he finally was able to pick up a new sump pump and we were freed from the dungeon..er...um.. I mean, we were out of the crawlspace. All things considered it could have been much worse, and was for many other people, so we consider ourselves very lucky.
