Blub

It's now 3:20 am. The pump in the unoccupied side of the duplex next door has been running for something in the nature of two hours now. The water is seeping through the wall, and the "master" key won't work in the lock to allow us to get in and turn the damn thing off. The first seepage was in the bathroom, and there are towels on the floor in there. I have looked on the kitchen side. The redeeming feature would seem to be the fact that the floors in here aren't flat. The water is pooling on the far side of the house. The tanks hold a hundred gallons of water, and the pump hasn't seized, which means that there is still water running through them. The real questions in my mind are twofold: how much damage will there be, and where will we live for the next nine weeks if this place is seriously damaged. In the meantime, the most important central fact is that there is no one responsible to take charge of things. No one to call. No one else to come out and unlock the door and shut the damn thing off. The locks have apparently been changed since the former occupant moved out, because of the problem with the water, which no one was apparently able to fix. The housing in this village is not owned by the school, but by a seperate entity. That outfit is so screwed (yes, I am thinking of a different word here) up that there is literally no one to get out here to get into the house and pull the plug on the pump. So it will run until it runs out or burns up. And we will have to cope with the mess. And that is the wonder of living out here. It is not all the wonders of nature.

We woke up to the running pump when the knock from the unhappy kid came at the door at 1:30, and the dogs started barking furiously. Not the first of that kind, and probably not the last. In the meantime, I just took Buddha out and the police came by looking for a wandering snowmachine (stolen, perhaps?).

So here's the question: do we just go back to bed and see if the whole house is floating when the alarm goes off in three and a quarter hours? Or shall we just call the whole night's sleep thing a failure and a mistake from the start? I have gotten two good solid hours of sleep-that should be enough to keep me going for the rest of the day. Choices-that's the important thing. Ya need to have choices in this life...