{"id":7400,"date":"2015-06-08T18:24:15","date_gmt":"2015-06-09T00:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=7400"},"modified":"2015-06-08T18:24:15","modified_gmt":"2015-06-09T00:24:15","slug":"ive-had-better-weekends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/08\/ive-had-better-weekends\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;ve Had Better Weekends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fast-moving thunderstorms that dump a lot of rain in a very short time aren&#8217;t unusual during the warmer months in Utah, but the storm that hit Saturday night was exceptional even for a &#8220;summer monsoon,&#8221; as my mother has always called them. Have a look at this:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><script src=\"http:\/\/player.ooyala.com\/iframe.js#pbid=3ce6404476914e86994d87aac3e4391b&amp;ec=d3ZmxqdTrt5BW-0XtT4Q0-hRKc2Yv4p7\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>My house is just down the street from the spot where much of that footage was captured. As it happens, I wasn&#8217;t home during the storm, but my lovely Anne was, and she tells me that the lawn, sidewalk, and street all vanished within minutes beneath a small lake. She also tells me water was actually rolling <em>up<\/em> the driveway from the street. But these were only interesting natural phenomena, passing curiosities gone almost as soon as they were observed. The <em>real<\/em> problem was a blocked downspout on the edge of our roof, which caused water to overtop the brim of the rain gutters and cascade down in a four-foot wide sheet&#8230; straight into the window well of our basement bedroom.<\/p>\n<p>The debris line left behind the next morning suggests the water rose to about six inches deep in the window well. I like to imagine it probably looked something like this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/titanic_smith-underwater-1.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-7405 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/titanic_smith-underwater-1.jpg\" alt=\"titanic_smith-underwater\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/titanic_smith-underwater-1.jpg 480w, https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/titanic_smith-underwater-1-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, our experience wasn&#8217;t as catastrophic as Captain Smith&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2vp--AlWBrU\">final moments<\/a> in\u00a0<em>Titanic &#8212; <\/em>the window did not implode in a spectacular manner &#8212; but the water got in anyhow, and, to finally get to the damn point, we&#8217;ve got to replace the carpet in our master bedroom. Our cozy, wall-to-wall, luxurious shag carpet, which my late Hannibal-cat loved to sharpen his claws in, which felt so warm and soft and cushy beneath my bare toes, just installed about two and a half years ago. Anne and I and my dad spent much of yesterday slicing it and the water-logged pad beneath into strips and hauling them upstairs in dripping, <em>heavy<\/em> bundles bound for the trash bins. To add insult to injury, I&#8217;d already spent much of Saturday hunched over in our shower, scouring away hard-water scales, so by the time I dropped into bed last night, I was so tired and sore I could barely move.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;ll take probably a week for the concrete to dry out, and then we&#8217;ll have to source new carpet and installers&#8230; and Anne no longer works in the floor-covering industry, which was such a big help to us when we first finished that room&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, like I said&#8230; I&#8217;ve had better weekends.<\/p>\n<p>It could&#8217;ve been worse, of course. I know other people in the general area who had several inches of standing water in their basements. We don&#8217;t even have any damage to the walls. But still&#8230; I find the whole situation deeply disheartening. What is it about being an adult that just about the time you feel like you&#8217;re getting ahead, paying off some bills, and finally seeing some goals coming within your reach, some bullshit thing like this knocks you back a rung or two?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fast-moving thunderstorms that dump a lot of rain in a very short time aren&#8217;t unusual during the warmer months in Utah, but the storm that hit Saturday night was exceptional even for a &#8220;summer monsoon,&#8221; as my mother has always called them. Have a look at this: &nbsp; My house is just down the street [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}