Relative Something

Things started out smoothly enough for a Saturday at the lake. I lingered in bed watching stage 8 of the Tour until breakfast was announced and afterward, I was doing a bit of reading as Cyndie and her mom were getting ready to take kids to Wilderness Walk in town to see some animals. What could go wrong? Well, the 5-year-old boy could disappear.

First, I notice his name being called, then soon after, Cyndie is seeking my help to find a missing child. My first question was whether all the bathrooms had been checked (yes) and then whether she had checked with the family with kids his age (she got no answer to a phone call there). I would walk down to their place. But that allowed plenty of time for others to get pretty stressed and I am amazed how quickly minds race to worst-case scenarios. Even with my intuition that he was just playing at the neighbors, my mind went immediately to thinking of the fact of the parents leaving us with their children and a tragedy under this situation would be a really tragic tragedy. But I found the boy playing with the kids there, safe and sound and happy as could be. I did my best to prepare him for the wrath he was about to face. He claimed to me to have told Gramma where he was going, but in the end, his story had some holes in it. The lesson appears to be well-learned about properly reporting his intentions on wandering anywhere on his own here.

When they returned from their excursion to pet animals, I joined them down at the beach where I found some shade to work on my sculpture. We were having a great time visiting with friends there and I’m sure it was over an hour when Cyndie ran up to get boat keys and returned to whisper something to me. Either I could take the kids out in the boat or I could go up and work on cleaning up the flood she discovered in the basement. When she got up there she found the washing machine was overflowing and there was about 2 inches of water on the floor in the laundry room and it had seeped in the carpet through most of the basement back rooms and inside the doorway of both bedrooms. We had a full fledged disaster on our hands.

I got a start on the cleanup immediately and then realized I shouldn’t waste any more time and needed to alert her parents and figure out the ultimate fix to the situation. The guy next door had just purchased a new wet/dry shop vac and I procured it and got to work. It filled fast and when I opened the plug to drain it, there was so much pressure it was not all going down the drain and I scrambled to control my flood within a flood. When I got ready to get back to vacuuming, the drain plug for the shop vac was nowhere to be found. Why does this kind of thing happen? Seriously, I don’t care about anything else at this point, I just want to know why the drain plug needs to disappear and totally interrupt the one thing that was working well to help us solve our flood dilemma.

There was a bunch of laundry on the floor by the drain and Cyndie was rushing to get it up off the floor as I was suddenly struggling to contain my mini disaster of water draining from the vacuum at a pretty high pressure. My hope and my assumption was that in her haste to get everything picked up off the floor, she accidentally scooped up that drain cap. We went through the baskets of that laundry multiple times, to no avail. My only other thought is that it somehow was swept down the drain, which had been left uncovered to allow for a drain hose from the dehumidifier. I have no idea how, because I was sitting there watching the water go down that drain, and can’t believe I wouldn’t have noticed if something went down the drain.

I just borrowed this thing from the neighbor. It was brand new. How am I going to face them with this knucklehead problem? How could it disappear? We needed to remove a lot of water still! How could this be happening!? Where could it be!!?? What do I do now? I spotted a little foam ball. I grabbed it, stuffed it in the hole and turned on the vacuum. It worked, for a while anyway. I heard a THWUP! and looked to see it was missing. I rushed to get back to the drain and eventually found the ball had been sucked inside the tub of the vacuum. I was worried it would pop out under the pressure of the water collecting in the tank, but instead, needed to leave more of the ball on the outside to keep it from getting sucked in. It worked enough to allow me to pull many gallons of water out of the carpet. But there is no way I am returning this with a toy ball stuck in the drain. How did I lose that cover and where in the heck did it go!!?

I just don’t understand.

After dark, I stepped out on the ground-level deck to bring in a couple of things we had out drying and was met by a very brave little raccoon that was happily helping to clean up bird seed that had spilled. In all my years of being up here, I have never stepped out and seen a raccoon an arm’s length from me, just going about eating as if I wasn’t there. It was a very atypical day.