Building my ark

It's been raining steady now for about 24 hours. I think that it's time that I begin building my ark, as the water in my little stream bordering my property is now over its banks. I guess into every life, a little rain must fall--this however is getting ridiculous.

The house in the country (has a nice bourgeous ring to it, don't you think?) where I live has always been afflicted by rain storms. Being that my wife and I were never home-ownership material, but bought into the whole "you must have a house because there are tax advantages" mentality, we built the one and only domicile that wasn't a rental unit for us. When I say built, we actually had a contractor who allowed us to do alot of the work, such as the interior and exterior painting, landscaping, finish work outside, etc.

Because the house was built on the cheap, some of the materials used were probably not first-quality--you know, the types of things that the "beautiful people" all have in their homes. Take for instance the windows in our daylight basement. One of them always leaks when the rain blows from the north, which during most torrential rains (like this one), alway necessitates buckets and drop cloths to soak up the water that drips continually until the rain stops. In addition to the leaky window, I now have sprung a leak around my chimney, as the seal around it obviously is compromised, so during wind-driven rain storms, I now have water dripping through the ceiling around my chimney, necessitating another bucket. I'm thinking it won't be long before I have buckets littering my house during each and every rainstorm.

To make matters worse, when we have rain of the magnitude of the current storm, my septic system floods and I'm unable to flush my toilets until the water level goes down, usually 8-10 hours after the deluge ends. On particularly heavy rains (like this one and one or two other times per year), the toilets begin to gurgle and "pop" in a creepy sort of way, which freaks out my dog and he starts barking at them. All of this is starting to remind me of the movie, The Money Pit, with Tom Hanks.

Adding to salt to the wound of all the minor headaches of home ownership and the little things that need repair, are the increasingly frequent power outages caused the many minor windstorms. I feel like I spend much of my life resetting digital clocks.

Frankly, I'm sick of home ownership! I think I'd like to move south in a couple of years and just live in a condo. No lawn to mow, no house to paint, no snow to shovel--just pay my monthly/yearly maintenance fee and kick back and enjoy life.