A rising tide lifts all, um, boats
Now that fall is staggering into Oregon, the weather has reverted to classic behavior, and it's raining. A lot. It's raining like it rains in the midwest, which means that in Portland everything is starting to flood.
Our house has a single sewer line running from our garage, through our backyard, and under the house before it heads out into the street to discharge it's appointed effluent. At some time in the past 100 years, one of the (now demised and logged) cherry trees in the backyard managed to twine around the sewer line and break it into a thousand pieces. And in the past 100 years, our house has settled so it sits at the bottom of a shallow moat. So when it rains a lot, we get the double whammy; in the backyard, water (and dirt, earthworms, pieces of rotten wood, and the occasional corpse of a small woodland animal) percolates down to the sewer pipe, then makes a bolt for the city sewer and completely fills it to the point where any prolonged use of water in the house causes the sewer to overflow, and at the same time the water that falls near the house fills up the little moat and percolates through the walls into the basement.
When the sewer is full, it tends to jam. And when it jams, the rising water carries things up through the pipes and out through the drains onto the basement floor. So after a long day's rain, we can go down into the basement and see little biological e. coli troop transports beaching themselves around the drainpipe. The easy solution to this (until we hire a jcb and redo the ENTIRE FUCKING SEWER LINE) should be to stuff an expandable pipe plug into the filthy and disgusting drain, so if the sewer wishes to flood it will have to go up a few more feet before it reaches freedom, but, alas, there's also water coming in through the walls, and if we plug the drain it will slowly fill the basement with (clean-ish, at least until it touches the filth that was left over from the other flooding [and the random bits of cat poop that the pedestrians of the apocolypse have hidden around the basement for us to find]) water from the moat.
It's pretty special. What we do is leave the drain unplugged until we do something that flushes a large amount of water down the drain, at which point someone bolts for the basement to wedge a plug in. And after the water has been given a chance to drain, someone bolts for the basement to remove that plug so that the basement won't fill with the water coming in through the wall.
And, for some odd reason, the best won't let me fill the basement with 6 feet of concrete. Odd.