After coming back to the house from running the dog, I was getting ready to head back into town to work out. I heard water running, sounding like a faucet was on inside the house. I wandered around, trying to locate the source of the noise. Still no luck. Finally I went down to the basement. As soon as I walked in, I stepped in a puddle of water. Almost the entire basement was covered in a half an inch of water. And it was still spewing forth from behind a wall in the corner. I quickly ran upstairs and shut off the water to the entire house. Luckily, I ran into one of my neighbors as I was taking out the garbage. She told her husband what had happened. Her husband told another neighbor what had happened. Pretty soon, the whole neighborhood was in my basement, fixing the problem. They pulled back the boards, removed some insulation, and voila. A copper pipe that fed a faucet outisde had iced over, blowing the pipe. I'm ignorant about all things house-related, but I'm quickly learning (it helps that neighbor #2 is a contractor/architect and the man who built the house I'm living in now). I had to rush away to pick up Mere from school, since the roads are horrible and the Honda she usually drives doesn't have four-wheel drive. Anyway, when I got back home after picking her up, the pipe was capped. The leak was stopped. The water was back on.
My neighbors rock. That's all I can say.
***
As far as the roads are concerned, when I went back to Bellingham to pick up Mere, I had one incident where I was in my lane, and the ice in my lane had formed an icy rut, like a skateboarding ramp. I found my car's tires rocking from one side to the other because the roads were so choppy. Soon, I found that my car's tires had been ejected, sending my car veering into the other lane towards on-coming traffic. Luckily, we were all travelling very slowly and the cars in the other lane were about thirty-yards away. That gave me enough time to get back into my lane. My heart was in my ears after that.
***
I bought an XBox 360. I'm never writing poetry again.
Actually, the truth is, I haven't had time to play it all that much. Mere's happy because it frees up the TV so she can watch her homeowner porn.
1 hour ago
2 comments:
My oh my! Not the water pipes! Glad you had good neighbors to help.
You cannot comprehend the initial pang of dispair I felt when I saw that flooded basement, Peter. It was like someone was trying to remove my heart by squeezing it out of my chest, between my ribs.
Yes, my neighbors rock.
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