Sump Pump

We have been having one crisis after another here at our house. Some of them have made me laugh so hard I've cried and others are just plain sad.

The funniest thing that has happened occurred on Bill's birthday. We were just getting ready for his party when the toilet exploded from between the base of it and the floor. Bill spent two thirds of the party in the basement mopping up raw sewage and trying to get it to stop. By the time he came upstairs again, he was drenched in grossness and had to take a shower. We didn't eat our Chinese meal until about 8:30pm, and Bill acted like it was a surprise party, even though we had all been making tons of noise and had even interacted with him some while he was downstairs.

The next day, we called our neighbors across the street, because he has a septic pumping truck and he was the only one I could think to call who would be honest with us. He came over immediately and they finally determined that the problem was a blown-out motor in the sump pump. Bill decided to take it upon himself to take apart said motor and see if he could fix it.

This is what I found when I looked off the back deck:

We had a friend here who had just river boarded down the Watauga Gorge and was just visiting for the night. Bill called us to the edge of the deck and pulled the object that had been lodged in the motor out for us to see. It was a rubber dinosaur! Not just any rubber dinosaur, but one of those animals that starts as an egg and when you put it in water, it expands to its full size. It was much larger than when it started out! I can't tell you how hard we laughed.

I put it down the toilet! It was me!

My mother gave it to Sam when she was here last year, just after we bought the house. Sam promptly threw it in my mop bucket and I poured the mop water down the toilet. I saw it going - I tried to grab it, but it was too late. I thought maybe it was stuck in the septic somewhere. But, no. It was in the sump pump, swirling around, until a couple days ago when it got sucked into the motor.

I called my mother to tell her about it and she laughed so hard - I haven't heard her laugh that hard in years. She said she's going to bring three more home with her this summer.

Once he removed it, the pump worked great. So, there you have it. A low-cost solution to a potentially bad problem. Of course, Bill spent hours working on it and we have no toilet in the bathroom now. But, maybe that will be fixed over the course of the next few weeks.

On a more sad note, my grandfather is in the hospital today. He fell down a couple times and ended up shaking after his last fall. They have done all kinds of scans and tests but do not have an answer to why he's been falling. I just spoke with him on the phone and he sounds so much better than he did yesterday. I think they are thinking he had a mini-stroke. The brain scan from this morning will show more information.

Please pray for him. And for us, as we will need to go down to Nashville tomorrow to see them. Bill is coming with me - so we'll be spending Easter there.


I'll update you more as I know more. Here we are in 2007, just after we arrived back from China. All my current photos are on my laptop, which is dead and in Thailand.