The Flood Cometh

"Oh."

I heard my brother's voice from inside my room, where I sat playing Lego Harry Potter, Years 5-7. (Yes, I play Lego Harry Potter. It is HARRY POTTER. If they made a Doctor Who game, I would play that, too.)

"Oh no."

This was when I stood up, because when some one in my house is frozen in shock, as my brother clearly was, it can mean only two things: 1. There is a spider or insect that rivals the size of Shelob from The Lord of the Rings or 2. Some vital part of the house has broken / fallen off / caved in / risen up to challenge its master for control.

Paul was in the bathroom, standing, holding a bathroom mat in his hands as water streamed down from the mat onto the floor, which, upon closer inspection, was flooded.

Flooded.

Yeah.

Paul was standing in the middle of a puddle which had encompassed the bathroom floor. The mats were surrounded, quickly becoming saturated, although they weren't too bad off--YET. Through a stroke of luck, the mat Paul was holding had acted as something of a levee, and the flood hadn't reached the hall carpet. But it was only a matter of time. I went for towels.

When I returned, Paul explained what he'd discovered.

Apparently, the bathroom sink, which has been slow to drain of late, had been left running by one of our parents. As the drain could not accept all the water, the sink slowly filled and overflowed, flooding first the counter, then the ground, where it pooled. And when I say "pooled," I mean, "Get me some floaties; I'll race you to the high dive."

Paul and I soaked up the water while Dad watched, because it is more fun to watch than help. Also because the bathroom is too small for three people to stand inside at once. But I think he would say he helped in a "supervisory" capacity, standing in the hall in his pajamas, waiting for us to finish cleaning so he could use the restroom.

As I wiped up the water from the floor, it hit me.

We could be dead.

Paul and I could have died the second we walked into that bathroom. THE VERY SECOND.

See, when things break in our house, they BREAK. At first, we thought the light bulb in the bathroom had burnt out. But then we realized that the problem was actually the light switch, which had lost some kind of vital connection inside, something electrical.

Since none of us are electricians, and we ought to avoid being trusted with power cables in general, even tiny ones, we solved the problem in our favorite way: We ignored it.

We took out the light bulb from the bathroom fixture, and we resolved to call someone for help. Then we got a lamp from a table somewhere, and plugged it in to the bathroom outlet, which is on the wall above the counter where  the sink lives.

The sink which had flooded.

As I examined the counter again, I saw that the water had pooled all around the sink, but had somehow avoided the lamp entirely. It was like the lamp was an island and the water was the sea. Water had not touched the lamp or the power cord. It was completely dry.

So Paul and I got to live.

Laura Blows a Fuse

I was midway through watching Glee (don't you judge me) last night when my television turned itself off. There was an audible click, and I was standing nowhere near the TV or the remote when it happened.

But before you think my house is haunted by Glee-hating spirits from the beyond, listen first to this: Throughout the evening, the lights in my bedroom had grown steadily dimmer.

Instantly, I thought: "Brownout." This is a THING. The power company reduces the amount of power sent out to various homes, causing the lights to dim considerably and power-sucking electronics, appliances, and so forth...they do not WORK.

I opened up my laptop, put in its battery, located my headlamp, and went on with watching the most recent episode of No Reservations. This was my quality knitting-time. I needed entertainment while I purled.

But then everything went dark. My laptop stayed on, and I discovered, much to my sadness, that a certain family member who borrows my headlamp from time to time had scavenged a battery from it (you know who you are).

All was dark. Except for Anthony Bourdain, who was eating something unspeakable that had been coaxed out of a fish.

We quickly discovered that the power wasn't all gone. The air conditioning still worked. The living room had power, as did part of the kitchen. The basement had power, meaning the well was working (so we could flush the toilet), the washer and dryer were working, and the dehumidifier was still going. What did all this mean?

We had blown a fuse.

Dad proved uninterested in solving the problem, so Mom was left attempting to determine which fuse had actually gone out. This was more complicated than one would hope, since we have no less than three fuse boxes and one breaker box.

Yeah. Really.

I have begun to believe that the people who built our house hired a drunk monkey electrician. We have even had the house rewired. But that just got us a breaker box. It did not consolidate the fuse boxes.

One fuse box handles the varied appliances and a non-specific portion of the house. One handles the garage and part of the house. The final seems to cover the same things as the other two, plus my bedroom and Paul's and the unfinished (i.e. the SAND ROOM because it is filled with PILES OF SAND plus lots of spiders and maybe snakes, weasels, and Satan) portion of the basement.

In our infinite wisdom, no one in the 25 years we have lived in this house had ever thought to figure out which fuse provides power to which section of the house. No electrician we've had has ever labeled them, either. So we have between 16-18 fuses and no one knows what any of them do. Also, we have a circuit breaker box which appears to control which of the fuses are on or off at any given time. Part of the fuses are numbered 60, part are 30, and part are 20. None of us have any idea what that means.

Naturally, we did not have any replacement fuses in the appropriate numbers. So Mom and Paul drove to Walmart* at 10:30 PM. I let them go without me because I had found a way (while the lights were still on) to pour olive brine down the length of my body. Also on my pillows.

By the time they returned, Dad had gone to sleep (Still without bothering to look at any part of the problem, but why would he? His room had power.) And when they arrived, Paul promptly went to sleep so he could wake up for work the next morning (today). This left Mom and I to replace the fuses.

We replaced every fuse we encountered. This meant all the garage fuses. Then we went downstairs and Mom slithered up into a cabinet under the stairs and replaced one of those fuses as well, because she thought it "looked funny." We observed it in better lighting and determined that it looked perfectly fine.

Nothing happened.

We still had no power. We resolved to sleep, and cope with the problem at some other time. Like, when the electricians were awake and able to answer phone calls from desperate people.

Approximately ten minutes later, power was restored to our house. Explain that to me. I really don't understand.

We were astounded. But we still went to sleep.

This morning, I woke up to get dressed from work only to find that we'd lost power AGAIN. In the same parts of the house, no less. So whatever is wrong, it is wrong enough to 1. Blow fuses for fun or 2. Consciously think up ways to torment us.


And because we are all overscheduled today...it is unlikely that this problem can be fixed when no one is around to kidnap an electrician. But I am just happy we can flush the toilet more than once without going down to the river for buckets of water. That gets old pretty fast.

*Walmart failed to give us half the stuff Mom bought. Also they sold us a flashlight that does not work. Then they did not apologize when we called to notify them. That was really friendly of them.

What's that burning?

Peru, apparently, exploded or something, because I have been without power since Tuesday night. There is no heat, there is no running water, there is no toilet-flushing, no liquids after 5:00 p.m., no internet, no Burn Notice, no lights, no refrigerator, and, above all, NO REASON TO LIVE.

"Laura, you're being dramatic!" you say. 

I say, "Try being a one-bathroom family of four when no one can flush the toilet unless they travel to the nearest town, which is 30 minutes away by car, and buy water. Talk about flushing money down the toilet."

But if all of that wasn't bad enough, there is this other problem. I have to go to work just like I do every day. Which means I have to find a way to be clean, which means washing my hair with bottled water, which is sometimes icy cold, like it was this morning.

Cold water is really cold.

Also there is no internet, so for all I know, one of the Republican candidates has already declared war on Iran. Hey--it could happen.

Not having electricity means I can't blow-dry my hair. So I came up with this ingenious solution yesterday, because I remember reading about someone doing it in Little House on The Prairie or maybe in Little Women. It was Little everything back then, apparently. And they also would wash their hair, sit by the fire, and dry it out.

Well. I was totally trying that.

So I fired up the gas fireplace a bit higher, and I tried it. IT WORKS AMAZINGLY. Especially if you are like Jo March post-train ticket, and your hair is super-short like mine. So I did it again this morning.

But between yesterday and today, something must have...changed. Maybe it was the distribution of product in my hair. Maybe the fireplace had been turned up too high for too long. It's anyone's guess. All I know is that as I was standing over the fireplace's vent, I heard a sizzling sound.

It is important to note that at no time was my hair actually touching fire OR the vent itself. My hair was touching AIR ONLY. Hot air, yes, but air all the same.

And that hot air from the fireplace totally scorched my hair.

I have like, two inches of hair? Maybe a little less in other places. But really, I cannot afford to lose hair to the fireplace or the hot air it produces. There is, quite simply, not enough hair to set fire to. Still, as I smelled that tell-tale scent of crispy-fried hair, I knew.

Now, some girls might be actually upset by the loss of hair to flame, but those girls can flush their toilet after they use it without walking down to the river and using a bucket to fill the toilet tank, and I am not one of those girls.

So, I dried my hair the rest of the way, put in the goop I use to make it look all cute and tousled, and went to work like a good little soldier. Because walking around work with fried hair is better than sitting at home with no electricity.

Happy winter, everybody.