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Adventures in Plumbing
September, 2007
Things with the house and shelter had been pretty trouble free for a while -- no major break downs, no doors falling off, no exploding toilets or sparks flying out of electrical stuff for several months.
This only meant we were due for something.
There are also times after you've been married for several years that you realize the honeymoon is over... times when you don't even think about divorce, and want to skip straight to mruder. Fortunately,
Bob and I haven't gotten to that, but come close every now and then. The last episode all started with a shelf in the linen closet, and of course, it was my fault.
It all started on a Sunday when a shelf in the linen closet collasped. I was immediately told I made it collaspe by putting too much weight on it. Silly me, I thought 6 bath towels on a shelf in the linen
closet was a good idea. While be was fixing the linen closet, Bob decided to "check" the clothes closet, "just in case". The results were not good.... Bob concluded the closet needed to be redone and
I had too many clothes. (I didn't agree)
The next day started with Bob making a trip to hardware store (ever notice how guys always have to go to the hardware store?) for closet parts. Afterwards he spent the better part of 15 minutes taking everything
out of the closet (& putting it on my side of the bed) so he could begin the "massive" repairs. By the time I arrived on the scene, I was again informed that there were too many clothes (and shoes) and that was why
Bob was spending his day off repairing a closet. Reminding him that his clothes were taking up more than the pre-nuputial agreed upon 18 inches of closet space didn't help. Eventually we arrived at a compromise, the
wedding and christening clothes could be packed and stored int he garage. That's when things really went downhill.
When Bob tried to put the newly packed box in the storage area, he took a hit of about 5 gallons of water, straight from the ceiling of the garage. This worsened his mood somewhat. When Bob returned to the bedroom
and told me what happened I could have responded in several ways: I could have put together enough curse words to make a sailor blush, I could have expressed sincere concern over Bob's welfare after the surprise
shower, I could have run downstairs to survey the damage. Asking Bob if he was kidding didn't exactly generate a loving heart warming response. Asking if he had any idea where the water came from didn't help any either.
We immediately changed our priorities to the source of hte water. Bob tore the wet drywall down from the ceiling and pretending to throw it down at me seemed to improve his mood a little. Eventually, after a series of exercises
involving my running upstairs to turn various faucets on, running back to hear muffled updates (the our cell phones probably would have really helped communications at this point) we found the leak in the form of a cracked
drain pipe coming from our shower. As I was the last person to use the shower, the cracked pipe was also my fault. We quickly and jointly made the executive decision that this problem was beyond our limited capacity to repair,
and we called our fix-it guy. Our fix-it guy had a great time laughing at our problem and promised to fix it in two days.
Fortunately, Mr Fix-it come back in two days and replaced the pipe. Unfortunately, it didn't completely fix the problme. Bob found this out the hard way when he checked it and got another couple of gallons of water on his
head. Somehow as I happened to be in the shower at the time, this was also my fault....
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