Turd Pirates

Rain, rain, rain, we've had so much rain the last week. Walking the dogs in this kind of weather is like planning for D-day. Check the radar, look outside to double check the radar, and timing. You have to have good timing with the dogs. Take a chance on getting around the block between showers, and guessing wrong will leave you not only soaked but with smelly, wet dogs. On television, the local weather panic peddlers have been going on about flooding, which in South Florida means larger than normal puddles. We don't get anything like real flooding here.

This morning it was raining so hard that it brought back memories of when I was a child and our basement would flood. The flooding basement was a never ending battle that my dad fought until the day he sold that house on Ravinia Drive. We would dread a heavy rain. It would mean that sooner or later the basement would start taking on water. The worst part about that was that the water was coming up from the sewer system, the combined storm/raw sewage, sewer system. Back in the olden days when I was a child, cities didn't see a need to treat the poop that you flushed down the toilet. It was the 'out of sight, out of mind' school of thought. As long as that stuff flushed out of the house to wherever it was they sent it, nobody cared. Unfortunately for our little subdivision, it often came back to visit us when it rained. As the water rose in the basement, the foul odor of every turd from every house in town would permeate our house. To alleviate the problem my dad had a stand pipe installed on the basement drain. The purpose of that was that if the sewage water rose no more than three feet, the stand pipe would contain it. That did not work very efficiently. What it did was turn the stand pipe into a poo fountain. We would sit on the basement stairs and watch the turds pop up out of the pipe and splash into the standing water. One time we even got the great idea of turning the little sandbox my dad had made for us into a raft, and we rafted around the basement on it. Me and my brothers and sisters floating around among the crap and used toilet paper. It was fantastic, we were the turd pirates...  until my mom saw what we were doing.