4 July, 1998

Waterworks

I didn't get any fireworks this year. Instead I got waterworks. From the kitchen sink, to be precise. After a bad night last night, in which I was basically moaning to the world about how terrible my life is and how much I hate the state of our house and how much I hate the fact that we never get anything done, never get anything clean, Sabs decided to get up this morning and help out by being domestic.

He did laundry and washed all of the dishes and was even cleaning out the kitchen sink, so that when I woke up and came out of the bedroom I'd be happy and cheerful and hug him and be proud of him.

This is what happened instead: sometime about a half hour before I woke up he turned on the kitchen sink to rinse something out. He was filling it up and left the water running while he came into the study to check on something on the computer. He forgot about the water and sat down and got busy with something. A half hour or so later, he went out into the kitchen and found it flooded with about 3 inches of water and more pouring out of the sink, with a 3 foot margin of the carpet on all sides of the kitchen soaked through and swampy. The downstairs neighbor came up and knocked on the door to ask if we knew we had a leak.

Then Sabs came in to see if I was awake and to find more towels.

I hauled myself out of bed to assess the damage and felt pretty grim about it. It was a lot of water and I was sure it was only going to get worse as it oozed into other people's apartments and made a mess and got us in trouble.

After a brief phone consultation with Sabs' mom, we traveled down to the Home Depot, and bought a wet/dry vac. A half hour after we got back, most of the water was in the vac's tank and the carpet had gone from swampy to just wet or damp. Much better, but still not an auspicious start to the day.

Sabs was slaying himself with guilt, I was too mad to try and say nice things to him to make him feel better (but I didn't lost my temper either .. YES!) and well it ws just ... messy. Eventually I calmed down and hugged him and we even managed to laugh a bit.

So the day wound up mostly spending itself out before we got going and went to have shakes and stuff at Friendly's. We grabbed a stack of movies at the video store and plan to spend the rest of the holiday quietly ensconced in front of the VCR ... where it's still dry and we can keep an eye on the cat.

Speaking of the cat. If she doesn't have these kittens soon, I'm going to pick her up and shake them out of her. I'm tired of trying to figure out whether she's going to have them on top of an electric socket or not. Come on Shara ... talk to me baby ... where you gonna have these fuzzballs so I can put the box in the right place huh?

I'm kidding. I'd never hurt my cat. I just do hope she has these babies soon 'cause I'm starting to get worried. So of course I'm hiding my worry in humor.

Seen Strange Days lately? I saw it with Sabs 3 years ago and finally saw it again today (see VCR bliss) good flick. Really good flick. If you haven't seen it, give it a whirl, it's a possible-future scenario with a kick-ass female heroine played by Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes (Schindler's List and The English Patient) as a slick shyster with a heart-of-gold. Cool stuff, thought provoking AND entertaining. The film has 2-3 pretty violent and shaking scenes too so if you're easily offended there are some parts where you might want to hide your eyes.

I think that's all for today, I've been channeling my creative writing spark in other directions for the past few days, so I don't have much left for this.