Water has been very problematic for me the past few days. It doesn’t seem to like me. Or maybe it likes me more than I’d like it to. You tell me….
Saturday, the first day of our 4 day weekend (Eli and I are taking today and Tuesday off, because they are our anniversary and solstice, respectively), the kitchen sink backs up, overflowing and flooding the entire counter. We ended up with nasty, slimy sink water all over and many boxes of ruined food. But at least we found it as early as we did. The neighbors downstairs had the same problem, most likely our upstairs neighbors had a clogged sink, which backed everything up for all the apartments on our corner. But downstairs they didn’t get maintenance out to fix it until the evening, hours after we had had them out to fix our sink. I don’t even want to think about how badly flooded their kicthen was.
Then, yesterday, just as we were getting ready to leave, I heard water running. In the bedroom. Not a place where water should be running, right? The baseboard heater had busted, or something, and water was positively pouring out of the heater in the corner. I noticed it in time to save my guitar and yell for Eli to help me get everything else out of the way. We called emergency maintenance, and tried to get in touch with our downstairs neighbor (since I’m sure they had water running down from their ceiling, and could, quite possibly, have had problems with their own baseboards). Neighbor wasn’t home and our on-call maintenance guy was busy (with, we found out later, another heat call), so he never called us back. A little over an hour after I had placed the call, our resident manager, A, came home from church. We told her what happened and she called our on-call guy. Thank goodness for A, she let him know what was up and told us that we would be fine to go out, so long as we left a note givig him permission to enter the apartment.
So, not having any idea what would end up happening with the apartment, we headed off to the Solstice ritual at Coldwater Spring… where our intent was to honor water. We exchanged quite a giggle at that.
The bedroom is now a bit of a mess. We moved the furniture out of the corner, shoved the bed as far out of the way as possible, and unplugged everything from that side of the room, including the alarm clock (I’m so glad we don’t have to go to work until Wednesday). The carpet is pulled up and fans running trying to dry everything out. I’m more than a little bit panicked about mold, and discomfitted about our comfy-cozy bedroom being torn apart. But what can you do?
Add to all that spending over $300 to somewhat fixing my brakes on Saturday, and it has been a wierd vacation.
I would joke about what else could go wrong over the next two days, but I don’t dare.
As the museum, Eli’s choice for activity of the day, is closed on Monday, we’re going “toodling”. I want to find some cool, small, local shops in our lovely town of St. Louis Park. Places to shop so that I can stop getting the evil eye from my fiancee every time I step into a chain store like Borders.
Wish us luck!
TTFN….