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Everyone’s teenagers send texts from inside their own house, right? It’s one of the wonders of the modern age. Your teenager can communicate with you without actually having to bother finding you first. (And you can tell your kids to simmer down without ever having to leave your bed. I love technology.)
So I got a text message this morning from my teenager. He let me know that the kids’ bathroom toilet had overflowed and he wondered what he should do. He didn’t do it; he only discovered it when he stepped in water.
I told him I needed to start work but then I’d come and check it out and deal with it. I was extremely nonchalant since I am a veteran of overflowing toilets. On the way downstairs, I stopped by the bathroom and told him to start soaking up the water from the carpet with bath towels. (Yes, you read that correctly. This is the second house in a row that we’ve owned that had carpet in the bathrooms when we moved in.)
Then I came downstairs to my office to log onto my computer to begin working except that . . . I heard water trickling. I looked at the ceiling, saw faint lines of dampness on the ceiling and hurried back upstairs.
When he said the toilet had overflowed . . . well. It was brimming over the top of the toilet. I turned the faucet off and began bailing toilet water into the tub so I could then plunge the toilet.
I’m telling you, it was an exciting way to start the day.
So then . . . we used every towel in the house to sop up water. When that job was done, I came back downstairs and noted that the trickling sound had stopped. However, two spots on the ceiling looked exceedingly soggy. After an hour of occasional drips falling, I probed the ceiling with my fingers and then poked a single hole (using a toothpick) in the center of the mushy drywall . . . and water turned from an occasional drop into a steady trickle.
Long story short . . . water fell all day. I covered my desk with towels, set up a bowl and collected about two gallons of yellowed water from my ceiling. It finally stopped dripping around 5 PM.
We’ve had fire (in the oven) and water (in the ceiling) and I can only hope we do not have some other catastrophe. I can only take so much. Seriously.
Actual Unretouched Photo 