MOISTURE IN THE HOOD

My partner is a very calm person. I’ve known him for fourteen
years and never have I seen him exclaim! in surprise
about anything.

Until this morning, that is.

His alarm went off in the hallway outside of our bedroom… at least I assume that it did – it’s so quiet that I can’t actually hear it, even if I’m completely awake.

I heard him open the bedroom door, then loudly exclaim, "Oh my god!" He then started to move very very quickly, tearing across the bedroom, grabbing clothes, stepping into shoes.

Last night I stayed up late writing and didn’t actually come to bed until about seven thirty this morning. Generally, I’ve been getting so much sleep that every once in a while there comes a night when I’m just so well rested that I don’t feel like I need more than a short nap. Last night was one of those nights.

"What the…?" Still bleary, I tried to figure out what was going on without waking my daughter, who was still sound asleep curled up in my arms.

"Flood!" was all he could say as he quickly pulled open a drawer and threw the first T-shirt he found over his head. "Water. Everywhere. Lots of it."

Disengaging myself from the sleeping bundle of warmth, I rolled out of bed and walked to the door into the hallway. Now it was my turn to gasp.

"Oh my god! Water! What…?"

Water poured out of the bathroom, into the hall, and cascaded down the air intake register to the furnace. By this point, my partner was already half way down the stairs to shut off the thermostat, not knowing how a few hundred gallons of water pouring into it would effect its performance.

It’s amazing that a seventy-nine cent chain could be the cause of such a mess, but that is the reality. Several times we’ve replaced the inner workings of our toilet in an attempt to end forever the wasteful and sporadic running water which flows when the chain gets crimped and the stopper in the tank doesn’t close. They’re always made out of the cheapest metal or plastic imaginable – there aren’t ones which don’t have at least a chance of catching upon themselves.

We can envision the Toilet Chain of Nirvana, made out of that chain which is composed of metal beads and often used for key rings or dog tags. It can’t crimp, can’t catch on itself, can’t leave a toilet pouring water all over your floor for hours.

But alas… such a fabulous item cannot be found, not even for a DOLLAR seventy-nine.

For the first time ever, a terrible chain of events occurred.

First, there was too much toilet paper in the toilet. Second, my daughter started fussing a little while I was in the bathroom right before bed, so I didn’t wait to make sure that the toilet started to fill and wasn’t going to run forever, which is what I normally do after I flush it. Third, the chain crimped and caught and the stopped up toilet ran and ran and ran.

Luckily there wasn’t anything… unsightly in the toilet at the time or I would have really freaked out. No, it was essentially just water and a whole lot of it.

A WHOLE lot of it.

I, too, put on my shoes and went downstairs after my partner to assess the damage. When I walked to the door into the kitchen, I gasped again.

It was raining. All over. With water standing two inches deep over every surface.

Of course, I blamed myself. If only I had stood there for thirty more seconds to make sure that the tank was filling. If only I’d gotten up to use the bathroom again, as I nearly always inevitably do. If only…

But, on the bright side, most nights the water would have been running for between six and eight hours before anyone awoke to discover it. Since I had gone to bed so late (or early depending upon how you look at it) the moisture only had about two hours to accumulate. It could have been worse… about four times worse.

We got out towels and started soaking them then wringing them out in the sinks. My partner did the bathroom first while I was getting dressed, finding appropriate shoes and surrounding my daughter with large pillows to protect her from the dangers of gravity.

The kitchen, being larger, took a while longer. We wrung and wrung, all the while with the drip drip drop of the rain falling on our heads.

It wasn’t a total wash (pardon the pun) and we didn’t really lose anything of great importance. All of the cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator were ruined, but the plastic bags inside were watertight enough to protect the cereal.

The paper bags next to the stove, the bag holding our paper recycling, the scrap paper next to the phone were all soaked, but so what? The toaster eventually worked again once it dried out, and all the major appliances were fine.

I didn’t even go into the basement until after my partner had done the first round of cleaning and disposal of cardboard boxes. At least the floor drain for the basement was right under where the water was coming down so that it had a place to go – we didn’t have standing water down there.

The amusing part came when we finally had the bulk of the flood wrung out into the sinks and the surfaces were starting to dry. Now was the moment of truth, the moment when we attempted to turn on some of the electrical appliances which had clearly been soaked but now were mostly dry.

The lights over the stove worked – that was good. I stood back as my partner turned on the exhaust fan and listened to the burbling noise coming from inside of it. It sounded almost exactly like a swamp cooler.

With all seriousness, my partner looked up into it and said, "There’s moisture in the hood."

I just cracked up. "Well, yeah. I guess you could say that." It seemed a fitting title to our adventure, the name of this particular episode.

The furnace, despite its dousing, also worked fine. We brought the dehumidifier up from the basement, turned on every fan in the house and let the furnace run.

Now, several hours later, the only thing which is still quite wet is the carpet outside of the bathroom and kitchen, but the dehumidifier is diligently taking care of that.

On a good note, my partner had been methodically straightening the kitchen and had just commented last night that he was almost ready to clean all of the surfaces. After its dousing today, he cleaned everything which had been touched by the water, including the edges under the stove and cabinets.

We had wanted to make sure, now that our daughter is crawling everywhere, that the nooks and crannies were clean enough for her to lick, in the event that she would choose to do that. After today I can safely say that even I would eat off the kitchen floor if I needed to for some reason.

In the background hum of the dehumidifier and fans I smell the clean, non-toxic scent of vinegar, nature’s One True Floor Cleaner. Our house is cleaner, though damper, than it has been in a while. Nothing important was destroyed, no one was hurt and it only took a day to clean up.

Surely, it could have been worse. As my partner pointed out, if he was to do battle with the elements inside of his own house first thing in the morning, he certainly preferred water over fire.

He’s still cleaning, in fact. Sometimes when he gets going on something, he’ll just keep going until he’s done all of the projects he’s been meaning to do. The basement steps have been cleared and cleaned, the cat food bowls relocated to a spot not so tempting to little curious hands (Kitty crackers! Oh boy!), and the counter cleaned and rearranged.

Earlier, knowing that we would be busy for most of the day, I put on a huge pot of homemade veggie soup which has been simmering and ready for snacking all day long. We’ve eaten well, finished a lot of projects we’d been trying to find the time to do and generally had a good time doing it.

So, though it isn’t exactly how we had planned to spend our day, it surely wasn’t a total waste. The cats have finally come out of hiding in the basement (Hey! It’s raining in here!) and our daughter has accepted that she’s not allowed to chew on the bright orange cord which powers the dehumidifier.

Though it was somewhat of a hassle, I’m grateful that we’re all warm, safe and eventually dry.