Simultaneously, the pipes behind the washing machine froze. The washer and dryer are located on the back porch. It's an enclosed porch. Enclosed meaning it has walls and windows, but no insulation or heating/cooling. It's freezing in the winter and hot in the summer. Whoever installed this set-up probably didn't have an education beyond the third grade. I had a lot of laundry to do this weekend, and it took until Sunday afternoon to figure out the right configuration of two heaters in relation to the pipes to get things moving.
Sunday evening I was surrounded by piles of clean laundry (dwarfed only by the piles of dirty laundry waiting their turn on the porch) and feeling rather self-satisfied by my ingenuity in solving the problem. My eight-year-old comes dripping out of the shower in such a panic that he's having a hard time getting the words out of his mouth. Finally we piece together enough words to realize that the toilet is overflowing. This is a fairly regular occurrence at our house, so my husband headed in with a plunger and I went back to my book. (Plum Spooky by Janet Evanovich, because I needed some laughs this weekend.)
The first sign that something was up was when I took in towels to mop up the floor and my husband asked me to see if the toilet in our bathroom would flush. Hmmm. Nope. It filled and swirled lazily in the bowl, in no hurry to go anywhere. Now, in this instance I would have been stumped right there. Once the water leaves the house, I have no idea where it goes. Ok, I know there are pipes and water mains, etc., etc., but as far as I am concerned these things are like asteroids - ideally, our orbits do not intersect.
My husband, however, heads down the basement to investigate. This is where I stand in awe of the male species, because he doesn't know any more about plumbing than I do, but he charges into the face of the unknown without hesitation. I remained on the couch, enjoying Italian pastries and men with Stephanie Plum. Without warning, I hear a SPLOOSHHHHHHH from the basement that reminded me of the giant buckets full of water at the Dells that would sound a warning bell before dumping their contents on squealing children below. Since I heard neither a warning bell nor squeals of delight, I sat frozen on the couch for a moment. Surely I didn't hear what I just heard and it couldn't mean what I thought it meant.
I crept to the basement door and listened. No swearing, screaming, or jumping up and down, which is what I would be doing in his place. In fact, there was only eerie silence.
"Honey?" I said tremulously. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," he said.
"Was that . . . water?" I asked. "Um . . . poopy water?"
"Some of it," he said.
"Did it . . . get . . . on you?" I was afraid to ask.
"Yep," he said. "Can you bring me down the plunger?"
I wanted to go down to the basement right then only slightly more than I wanted to shave my head and streak through downtown in six degree weather. But, my man was down there being very stoic about the whole thing, so I squared my shoulders and started down the stairs. I was picturing a scene similar to the one in RV where Robin Williams creates a geyser of sewage while trying to empty the camper crapper, but the damage was, thankfully, not that dramatic.
One of our children - who will remain nameless - recently took on the chore of cleaning the bathroom fixtures every day with Clorox wipes. Said child apparently decided that the best way to dispose of said wipes was to flush them down the toilet. In case you've ever considered trying this, it's apparently a very bad idea. Our line is now clogged somewhere between the house and the street - Jupiter, by my map - and there is nothing more we can do other than wait for the "sewer guy" in the morning.
My thoughts are, we've done what we can, so we should wait for the sewer guy back on the couch where Stephanie Plum has just blown up a building instead of a car for a change, but my husband thinks it's necessary to organize the basement before the sewer guy comes. In my opinion, if our boxes and tubs of out-of-season clothing, family pictures, and Christmas decorations are offensive to the sewer guy, then he should probably rethink his career decisions. However, given that Dear Husband is having a very unpleasant evening and isn't remotely unhinged yet, I decided to keep my mouth shut and help shuffle boxes around before sacrificing my mop and providing a bucket of bleach water to mop up the mess.
By the time we made it back upstairs, I was more than ready to escape the comedy of my own life head back to Trenton, NJ for some virtual hilarity. For once, I was ready for Dear Husband to escape into his own world (of Warcraft - his current hobby), as I doubt that anything else could wipe off the gray mask of blech that had crawled onto his skull. Here's hoping that a few Dungeon raids will ease the pain of his Basement Shower of Ugg.
