crappy day

and I'm not just saying it's crappy because I got four hours of sleep, or because the coffee maker broke, or because I have a MIR space station sized pimple on my chin making me look like a witch. It was truly a crappy morning because my toilet decided to purge itself of any items it had digested within the last 48 hours.

I began my day with a 6:30 wake up (after having gone to bed at 2:00) followed by an ant crawling across my pillow and onto my face. When I finally managed to drag myself out of bed Alex kindly let me know that he didn't put enough water in the coffee maker, so there was just a smidgen of really strong coffee left for me, if I wanted it. I decided to make new coffee and upon doing this noticed that Alex had put plenty of water in, but the coffee maker was busted. I tried to fix the coffee maker, and while working on this impossible task, realized that this thing which supplies me with delicious coffee every morning was actually the anti-Christ and the root of every problem I've ever had since I was 12. This led me to believe that the best thing to do would be to "Fonzie" the coffee maker. With one swift hit of my fist, three mysterious and small plastic pieces flung onto the countertop. So long, coffee maker, thanks for the memories. I pulled the old tiny coffee maker out of hiding and began my brewing again.

With breakfast finally out of the way it was time to get ready for work. I knew things were bad when I was taking a shower and noticed water wasn't draining, but instead kept accumulating along with hair and soap scum. This has been happening for weeks, but the water never got this deep.

Then I flushed the toilet.

Alex and I always put the toilet lid down after each use, because that way it's fair all around. Everyone has to put something down, regardless of how you use the toilet. (And I don't know if Zach the cat would ever want to drink toilet water, but this way we don't have to find out.) I put the lid down before the fateful flush and while washing my hands noticed something out of the corner of my eye; was the lid moving? Oh yeah, the lid was moving, and all sorts of unpleasant water was moving that lid. Powered by sheer panic and adrenaline I was able to move the scale and the litter box before anything coming from within Village plumbing reached them. Then I started thinking plunger. I knew we used to have a plunger, was it under the sink? was it in the closet? was it outside? was it in the outside storage? was I sure I didn't see it under the sink? We used to have a plunger. I guess a plunger isn't one of the things you take with you when you move. I'm not going to get into details here, but I will let you know that I will be buying a new toilet brush this evening and even though Swiffers are fun little moppy things to have around, it's very important to always have legit mop in the house.

Even after my cleaning and creative problem solving, the toilet was still not doing so well, so I had to call maintenance; something had to be done that was out of my realm of toilet knowledge. I called the Village office and then ran around hiding all things cat-like and hoped to skedaddle before the maintenance dude got there. Alas, I wasn't fast enough. For some reason I find it humiliating to explain a mess in my bathroom to a maintenance guy. As I opened the door my gut reaction was to say "It's not my fault," because honestly, it wasn't! But what came out was "sorry." That's a fine how-do-you-do to a man with a plunger in his hand. I just know that I would never want his job, so I have an immense amount of respect and sympathy for the guy, thus the sorry.

I stuck around while he finished whatever he did. He worked some plumbing magic that even fixed the tub! I would have offered him some coffee, but I didn't want to revisit that trauma.

The rest day didn't turn out all bad though; lunch with Sean and Greg had me feeling better and then Jerome sent me this. I think I'm on the road to recovery. I even used a toilet again today and didn't flinch before flushing.