The dam breaks

Yesterday we got three and a half inches of wet stuff compliments of tropical storm Hanna. I had covered all the footing holes and the foundation trench on the addition site with chipboard panels, cheerfully supplied by my contractor a couple weeks back. I had propped them up on one side so the rain would run off, and dug trenches at the bottom edge of the panels to catch the runoff. I dug little trenches and holes so water running off the footing hole covers would have a place to collect. I did all this work well before any threat of a tropical storm, and the arrangement worked perfectly for a quarter-inch rain we had gotten a week or so later. Then Hanna hit. I went out and checked at about the inch-and-a-half point, and things were pretty dry in the big trench. A few drips, but you can't have everything. I fixed the cover at the very edge of the house—the downspout had been removed when they took off the siding, so water from the gutter ran right down the side of the house. Tacking a sheet of rubber to the house seemed to do the trick. I went inside soaked to the bone but confident that I had done everything I could to keep the area dry. Alas, it was to no avail. We got so much rain it overwhelmed all of my dams at one place or another, and when I went out to look the next morning, I had over two feet of water in the trench, and half the footing holes were full to within a couple inches of the top. Two holes had only a couple inches of water. A giant tarp, fastened to the house and sloped to the drainage ditches might have protected the site, but that didn't happen. I put the sump pump to work, and pretty much all the water is out, but now I have a continent of mud down there again. It's conceivable we'll have the permit on Monday and an inspector on Tuesday. I don't know if the contractor will send some of his guys out to clean up the trench and holes, but I don't intend to wait a week or more for it to dry out, and even then it'll still need some cleanup. So this 63-year-old geezer will be out there before and after work Monday digging in the mud to make some headway in the hope that we can be ready the first chance that an inspector has to come look. I will not allow a delay if I can do anything to prevent it. Whatever it takes. No job is beneath me. Which leads to a book I just finished, The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. No job is beneath you is one of the points he makes, along with the principle that brick walls are not to prevent you from getting something, but to determine how badly you want something. Lots of other good stuff. Short book; easy, thought-provoking read. If you don't know about the last lecture, you can see the actual lecture on the web—check out thelastlecture.com. His premise is that you can fulfill your childhood dreams, and he describes his and how he managed to do so, and what he learned along the way. It's really about how to live your life. I won't spoil things by giving away any more details. Check it out.