So what with a plumber banging around in the ceiling, I couldn’t call it a night’s sleep and in the morning some guys come who do water damage clean up and, aside from having the condo swept away by a flood it’s about as bad as it can get. The main guy, Danny, goes around with this little meter he sticks in the wall that tells him how wet the wall is and this thing is going off—beep, beep, beep—like it has discovered uranium or something. The little pantry wall is saturated, as is the carpet on the floor. Also water ran out from the little pantry onto our new white carpet in the living area and it too is saturated…and as for my office…it’s a damn mess.
They start bringing in these damn machines they call “dehumidifiers” which are like air conditioners that give off heat—I mean they blow out hot air and they make a significant low grade, but irritating noise. So I start moving stuff—that I have just put in—my little office and they bring in the machines…and then, I can’t believe, Danny says those machines—four of them, by this time, will have to be on for five days. And probably, given the way the damn little beeper is going off, he is going also to have to take out one wall in my little closet office so he can get to the insulation behind the wall that he believes is completely saturated.
I am like totally and completely fit to be tied. I am pretty pissed off too because this is the third time, three years in a row, that we have had major water leak problems. Two summers ago was the slab leak right in the middle of the kitchen area—so for like weeks and weeks we have people coming and going and a big hole, and then dirt, and finally concrete (that can’t be covered because it has to “cure” properly) in the middle of the kitchen. And last summer when we get back from SC we start smelling a smell in the little pantry that alerts us to the fact that the wall has been saturated from a bad leak, while we were gone, in the utility closet, and the repair of that drags on for over a month….And now this…
What a freaking mess—we were finally starting to get things back in a little order and now this. Chaos again. Junk everywhere. A place for nothing and nothing in its place. And I have got to go teach.
Poor Carol, in the middle of all this, gets a call from the people who are cremating her mother’s remains saying they have not received some signed documents from Carol which they haven’t because they faxed the documents to Carol’s work place and nobody told her they had arrived, so she has to rush right over there and get the documents and sign them immediately because if she doesn’t, well, her mother will have to be frozen for eight days like a popsicle because the cremation place is about to close down for 8 days for its yearly cremation cleanup. But she gets the documents in on time and as far as we know her mother was cremated right on scheduled and is not sitting in some freezer frozen like a Popsicle.
We get a good laugh out of that—Bertha, the Popsicle, I say—because, what the hell, it is too grotesque not to laugh.
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1. damn dehumidifier in closet office.
2. kitty-cat in chaos
3. downstairs chaos
4 chaos continued
