Thursday, June 02, 2005

... what happened next.

So after I recovered the ATM card from it’s backseat adventures, I actually had a nice weekend. A date-night at a hipster restaurant downtown (complete with free babysitting); a visit from my parents and sister; a family-wide barbeque at our house; and a day-long graduation celebration for my cousin – the one with the great sense of humor.

And then the real fun started.

On Monday afternoon Em and I were hanging out in the backyard, enjoying the sun and watching the dogs wrestle in the freshly sprinkled grass seed. I was just on my way to the neighbor’s swing set with the baby on my hip when Canon came out of the house with that face… the one that makes me panic. I seriously thought someone was dead.

That someone turned out to be a water pipe that runs through the middle of our house and feeds the outside spigot. And when it died, it took its sleek, seamless body with it, leaving an inch-long escape route for all that angry, pent-up water. The water, it grabbed its opportunity.

It gushed through the pipe, soaked the wall and pooled on the carpet. Then it started forming a little river through our basement… running through Canon’s office and our guest bedroom, into the hallway and the guest bathroom. Luckily, the pipe had only been hemorrhaging water for 10 minutes or so before Canon discovered it.

So no swinging for the baby. Instead she sat on the family room floor and wailed while we hauled boxes of soggy documents and photographs out of the office and stacked them in safe places.

Canon was able to shut off our water supply, successfully locate the leak on his first try (this involved blindly cutting out a chunk of wall) and get all the right parts to fix it (in only four trips to the hardware store!). Not bad for an amateur plumber, huh? It was the welding that finally proved too difficult.

Because it was a holiday and we’re cheap like that, we figured we could go for the next 18 hours or so without running water until a plumber could come in at non-emergency rates. And we did. We considered using the baby wipes for sponge baths but settled on showering at our friends’ house instead. I was allowed three flushes, one for each toilet, but I rationed myself and only used two. Damn, I’m good. The rest – using bottled water to brush our teeth and wash our hands – was pretty much like camping. Lucky us, all the drawbacks of a night in the wilderness and none of the benefits. At least it didn’t rain.

2 comments:

Krissy said...

I bow to your mad endurance skilz. I would have been on to the phone for a tripe-rate plumber in two seconds. Wow. What a day!!

I'm glad things have worked out. I hope your papers are drying. Do you have fans on the carpeting?

Anonymous said...

That reminds me of several basement-flood stories we've had in the five years we've lived here - the part I relate to is the endless procession of soggy belongings being carried out of the wet room to be categorized as trash or salvageable. Has everything dried out by now?
-Elise