The last big round of storms that came through St. Louis did us no damage (maybe some small hail dings in my spouse’s car). A few blocks away, a big tree fell over and smashed the crap out of an SUV as well as doing some damage to another car. But mostly the neighborhood went unscathed.
However, while we were in the basement during a tornado warning, water started pouring out of the basement wall. Thankfully it was right near the sump pit, and gravity plus a bucket helped us reduce the flooding. The sump pit wasn’t very full, so I figured, water wasn’t draining into it the way it should.
In addition to this leak, we’ve had some visible cracks. Some in the basement when you start looking for them, along the mortar and under a window, but it looks like surface-level stuff, not very scary looking. There’s an uglier one in the blocks under the front porch but the contractor who came yesterday said it’s basically cosmetic. There are a couple of minor drywall cracks, and one larger one that is under my desk and behind a bunch of stuff.
I grew up in Florida, where we have no basements. It’s been an education. Apparently the “foundation” isn’t just the big slab of concrete that everything else rests on, but the walls of the basement, below ground level. Concrete blocks especially are porous and have big voids inside that can fill with water. This will soak through, leading to a humid/damp/moldy basement. Also water is heavy, and the all that extra pressure is basically a very slow siege engine.
A sump pit and pump are supposed to deal with that. The bottom of the wall is supposed to have weep holes, which drain into a French drain or other system, which then directs the water to a sump pit, where it’s pumped upward and away from the house.
Our drains were apparently poorly done. The edges of our basement floor are angled upward, which told the guy who came to give us an estimate that they weren’t deep enough.
We also have basically done any gutter maintenance, and this is super important for reducing the amount of water that collects in the immediate vicinity of the foundation. File this under “practical knowledge that nobody ever sufficiently explained to me.” I knew more about quantum physics than this stuff, and I’m not at all a physicist or mathematician.
Anyway. They are going to jackhammer around two sides of our garage/basement, dig a deeper trench, put in a much better drain system, and also route the line from the sump pump (and one of the drainpipes) through a shallowly buried PVC drain pipe down below the level of our new retaining wall so it can run downhill.
This is not going to be cheap, but needs to be done. But first, we need to move stuff out of the “workshop” area of the basement, and get someone to cut a hole in the wall between the garage and basement. (If it was just the drywall I’d do it myself, but framing may need to be removed too.) We also need to get our gutters cleaned and inspected for any repairs, improvements, and drainpipe extensions.
The new album progresses. Three tracks so far, all sharing a vibe. There’s more of an element of “not intentionally sequenced/controlled” to this — interactions of different modulations, crisscrossed between different sources and destinations creating a “busy” sound, as well as letting different frequencies collide without regard to any particular tuning system. On the odd tracks, delays and feedback also add to the complexity. One of those sources of modulation has been Marbles, set to maximum jitter — I’ve kept the same settings on all three tracks, and have made that one of my rules.
Drone Day is tomorrow, and I’ll probably go ahead and record track 4 with a much more droney and less chaotic overall feel. (I’ll still use Marbles, but likely not for pitch.) Whether that will mark a transition or just punctuation in the flow of the album remains to be seen. I’m trying to just let things flow as they will.
Already, for the next project I want to do something more deliberate — both in the sense of “intentional” and in the sense of “slow and thoughtful.” This one has been chaotic. It sounds like I’m letting out some frustration/anger with the way things are right now, and that’s probably true.
Recently read: Aiden Thomas’ Cemetery Boys. A trans brujo in East LA proves himself by solving a dark mystery. Some fun characters (both living and dead) and a glimpse into a culture I don’t know that much about. Everything I knew about Dia de Muertos came from Coco, and everything I knew about Santa Muerte came from news articles from about 15 years ago. While this was a fantasy story, I’m guessing from the way it reads and the authors’ comments, it’s relatively authentic.
Currently reading: Lila Bowen’s Wake of Vultures. This is a book that makes me wonder why I don’t read more Westerns, or at least Weird West horror/fantasy with vampires and shapeshifters. The answer is probably because I expect Westerns to be brimful of macho bullshit. Here the MC is a half-Black, half-“Injun” trans man who reluctantly ends up on a quest to kill a monster that’s been plaguing the people of Durango (Mexico, not Colorado). The writing style and language are fun like Firefly was fun (maybe more so, but then I’m bitter about Joss Whedon these days.)