sump pump party.

mother nature a'int playing around these days. as was the case again this weekend. the nastiest of nor'easters blew into town friday and totally overstayed its welcome. i say very delicately that i escaped the wrath of this storm almost entirely compared to the 187,000 people in the area who are still without power, not to be restored until at least tuesday.

that's a whole lotta milk that's gonna go bad.

at 11:45PM last night, i suited up in clothes i didn't care about and raced to my friend's house which was flooding rapidly.

at 5:00am, i returned home.

by candlelight, we spent these joyful hours chasing water. literally. it was coming up through the sump pump faster than we could bail it out. once the beer was gone and once we had hit the punchy point of delirium, we realized there wasn't much left to do except baracade the pumps with mexican blankets and hope for the best.

now here is something i don't understand -- sump pumps run off electricity. lights go out, sump pump stops pumping, flooding begins. is there no better system for this? unless of course you are informed upon installation that battery backup is 300% necessary, which i unfortunately don't think is the case for the majority. electricity failure is not exactly a flukey thing. i mean at some point during the year, we'll all be sitting by candlelight trying to figure out how long we have until the steaks in the freezer have expired. so in theory, we should STILL be bucket-brigading over there.

water is really the enemy sometimes.

but headlamps are genius.