Our Zen Water Cave & Why We Needed to be Married to One Another

It was quite a day: our stove was ordered and greenrock hung above the tub, the sinks templated and marked for cutting, water pipe layout designed, and children herded like wild kittens; the "light thundershowers" forecast for today morphed into one heckuva downpour. Zorak and I headed to the basement to grab the specs on the wood stove, killing time to wait out the onslaught so we could leave between floods.

It was then I heard it. The Zen Water Garden. The gigantic, Buddha-sized Water Garden. The part of my brain that's in denial tried to say it was someone flushing the toilet, or perhaps doing laundry. The very small part of my brain that's still semi-functional insisted that no, we have nothing to flush, that's simply got to be a water fountain. (Notice I've said nothing about my brain being reliable in either instance, only that it disagreed with itself on several levels.) Anyhow, I followed the sound to the Scary Room, and there we found it...

The biggest indoor waterfall we've seen since we hit the Rocky Mountain Knife Factory in Pigeon Forge, TN. Fifteen feet long, eleven feet high, and flowing at an unknown - although thoroughly impressive - rate.

Hey, honey, I think we've found another leak.

Ya think??

Zorak made a funnel from a gallon jug and the garden hose while I went in search of tar paper. He got the funnel set up to catch the water, then trekked into the darkness to divert the water from the house. Yes, we have a tar paper gutter system on the ground now, but this was an emergency. And it worked. We have it staved off temporarily, but that does explain a lot, as well as confirm our plans to move the gutters and install a French drain along the back side of the house.

Since we closed on the home, the weather has been positively perfect (read: dry). The last two times it's rained, we've dutifully checked the basement, the walls, the attic. All have stayed dry. The Smell emanating from the yucky room seemed to increase, but that room is so nasty that it's difficult to tell when something's gone "wrong" in there. Poor Rufus, our dehumidifier, however, went from being able to run for about 36 hours before filling up, to less than 12 before he was stuffed. Huh. Well, yeah, indoor waterscaping can do that to the humidity level in a room.

Now, why, one may ask, does this story highlight how important it is that Zorak and I married each other? It's simple, really. In this case, we were both needed to make the problem not become an issue. He didn't hear the water, so if it wasn't for me and my bird-dog like sense of hearing, he wouldn't have found the waterfall at all. Yet if it wasn't for him and his quick engineering-type thinking, I'd still be sitting in the Scary Room, watching it flow, thinking, "Yeah, this is bad. I hope it stops raining soon so I can slap some tar on the foundation... *sigh*" But together, we found it and stopped it. YAY US!! Things like this make up for the times I forgot to wash the whites or he didn't hear me beg for creamer on his way home from work. It's good stuff, the way we work together. I wouldn't want to be married to anyone else. Ever. He's the best.

Kiss those babies, and those wonderful co-conspirator loved ones. What would life be without them? (Mine would be rather wet and soggy.)
~Dy