My Birthday Drain

You know you are getting old when you are getting birthday gifts that aren't even things you can take with you when you move. This year, I got a drain.

Yeah, fools, you read that right, a drain.

The jackasses who built my house back in the Dark Ages thought it was a wise idea to slope this concrete pad leading to my basement toward the house. I have so many guests come over and say, "Thanks, I enjoyed standing in that lake welling up in your basement." It defies common sense and engineering. Even Luke, who is still in engineering school, took one look at it last year and said it was the dumbest damn thing he's ever seen (other than seeing the Bengals in person).

Every time it rains more than 15 minutes, I had to go downstairs and start bailing water out of the basement. Funny how the house inspector never noticed it on the two inspections he made of the property. It's pretty damn noticeable. Last year I spent $200 on this nifty little pump that helped most of the time, but I feared what would happen if the power every went out in the house, which is never paired with heavy storms, right? That pump and I hung out a lot between the hours of 2 and 5 a.m. I felt like I had a Wilson-level friendship going on.

At long last this year the wife decided to buy me a drain. Three dudes came over, dug up some dirt, whipped out the concrete saw, and in just a half-day's work this beauty was installed. Three of the next 5 nights, as luck would have it, brought huge storms all night long.

I slept soundly through them all. Let that drain do all the work. Ahhhh, nice.