Diggin' a ditch

Here's the masterpiece. We'd had trouble with this area before, and Jon had filled more dirt into this north west facing corner, and it had stopped leaking. Until the storm.

What would be the basement on any other house is the main living space in our house. So the builder thought he'd make it more comfortable (so Jon says) and build it out of wood rather than cement block. Sounds kinda strange to me, but that's how it is.

The corner you see in the picture is like this: the wall straight ahead is wood. The wall on the left is a bedroom added on later and made from cement block as you can see in the pictures below. I think the problem might be where the two materials meet. And the storm dumped such an amount of rain that the gutters overflowed and the rain ran right into the corner. So Jon spent a

couple of days digging out, and then fixing it up somehow--Kristine says it involved some mud 'snowmen' and mud angels (and I think it was a good thing I wasn't there)--and he's already filled it back up. I thought that maybe, since he'd had it all dug out, that he'd put in a back door there. It would be very handy there coming out of the laundry room. (As if we need another half-finished project around here. Isn't that what life's about?!)

This is the closet in that bedroom after he'd torn out the sheetrock and insulation.

We're putting a wood floor in this room--it's half way done at the moment--so I guess it was a good thing this happened now and not after we'd finished the floor.
















This has nothing to do with the leaking back bedroom. It just happened to be on the camera with the other pictures. It made me laugh, so I thought I'd share.

I love Chinese food. But I can't afford to eat it as often as I like, and I hate the crazy recipes and deep frying required to make it myself. So I'm always on the lookout for faux Chinese recipes--ones that don't take any odd ingredients and don't require me to do much more than stirfry.

I came across a recipe for lemon chicken that involved some lemon flavor jello. And it was quick and easy and I had most of the ingredients(except the lemon jello). So I substituted lime jello. It turned out this lovely shade of green, and it was delicious. Kristine protested loudly at the unusual color until I told her she could go without any supper, and then she ate with gusto and asked for more. And Jon gave it an enthusiastic 2 thumbs up. Maybe I'll keep the substitution.