This morning upon returning home from work I discovered that there was a lot of water in my basement, so with the aid of a mop and an old tote box, I spent nearly 3 hours getting as much water off the floor as possible. When I finished, the basement was almost free of water, however now – nearly 9 hours later – it is beginning to fill up again.

I’ll devote more time to it later this evening.

The reason for all the water is due to an early summer Winter Storm that came through the area that dumped large amounts of snow and rain in my already heavily saturated area.  Although the previous owners of my house spent upwards of $5,000 getting the basement “leak proof”, the water still found a way to get in. My plan of action is to deal with this current situation and monitor the area for future issues.

I do believe the water in the basement is the result of the peculiar weather we had yesterday because this is the first time since moving in that any water has appeared in the basement – and we’ve had some intense severe storms move through that dumped a considerable amount of rain – and none of that ended up in the basement.

In other news: I’m still searching for a roommate. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to cover my bills this month – keeping in mind that I need to set aside an extra $300. I believe that I’ll be able to do it, but it will be a challenge.

For the past several days I’ve been reading this book about the history of the US Post Office  (by Winifred Gallagher) and how it helped to shape and, essentially, create the USA as we know it today.  The book is quite interesting and for some peculiar reason I am considering it a good companion book to another one of my favorite American history books called American Canopy  by Eric Rutkow.

Although Gallagher’s book is about how a rather progressive institution helped to create America into what it is today and the other is about how America’s unique, unadulterated (at the time) natural resources (tree’s) helped to shape America’s cultural landscape – how these two things intertwine is what I find fascinating. Clearly neither book delves into the counterparts topic – but you can see the parallels in how they connect. For instance, numerous of the towns that got the early post offices were early mill towns – and in several aspects, the hunt for lumber was the pretext for quite a bit of American  expansion.

I’d easily include these books as required reading for students, because then you can *see* how politics and day to day life – and nature intertwine to create the world that we live in. Today our politics, nature, culture, religion etc. are all so compartmentalized that it gets tough to see how one corresponds with the other – and make no mistake about it, they do correspond with each other.

The town that I currently live in in Michigan for instance owes it’s existence to the early furniture industry AND the Mennonites; neither of which have much of a modern day presence here. Yes, the founding of my current town once exported wooden chairs all over the USA. The old chair factory made gained so much business that they had to seek out a larger location and before the turn of the century (1900) had to relocate elsewhere. But upon moving, a sprawling town had already emerged.

The chair factory had so much wood left in it’s old factory in my town that after the company left, the town used the left over wood to build a bridge to get across the river. The foundation of the old factory is considered a historic landmark to this day.

It goes without saying that this town probably would not exist if it weren’t for the lumber industry that attracted job seekers who later developed the town – a town that soon required a post office to keep in contact with other growing areas.

As a personal note: the only reason that I haven’t been able to just zip right through the book about the post office’s role in America is because my mind has been heavily preoccupied with other life events. It’s been a little tough to remain focused.