If It Isn't One Thing...

Total off topic whine, but I've just got to do this. I know it's inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but at this moment in time it's my Titanic.

Sometimes I really hate being a grownup. I hate owning a house and having to handle the problems when they come up. Which they always do, of course.

Over the weekend, we discovered that when we would run a load of laundry, the drain in the basement floor would fill up and spill over onto the floor. Yuck. We cleaned up the mess, stopped doing laundry, and Monday morning I found a plumber who would come out to take a look and hopefully spend no more than an hour or so rodding out the small section of blocked pipe.

Well, the plumber came today. And after an hour, he determined that the blockage is not inside our house but rather beyond our house. He knows this because he used his 40 foot snake and came against nothing, so the problem seems to be beyond the scope of the equipment he had with him at the time. Add to this the fact that it's not just washing laundry that causes the pipes to fill to a dangerous possibly-overspilling level. It's also flushing the toilets. And taking showers. And FLUSHING THE TOILETS!

He's coming back tomorrow with more powerful equipment (which, apparently, costs twice as much to operate since my hourly rate more than doubles now). He left me with a warning that we shouldn't flush our toilets more than once every hour or two, and perhaps it would even be wise to station someone in the basement to catch any overflow in cast the 10% of pipe that is still open becomes blocked.

My big fear is that we are looking at the kind of problems that involve ripping up our front yard and the street in front of our house to replace damaged piping. I've been through this before, and it's not pretty either in terms of inconvenience (did you see what he said - NO FLUSHING OF TOILETS?) and cost. Why, when plumbing goes wrong, does it always have to go so totally, completely over the top wrong?

And me, being the easily distracted gal I am, of course cannot get my mind on anything else until the problem is solved and I can flush in peace. Awfully hard to write about true love and other sweet things when the spectre of raw sewage is floating over your head.