Mondays Of Doom

Well, Monday sucked.

On Sunday, we found a bug. I'm not going to talk about what kind of bug except to reassure everyone that no, it's not the kind that lives in your hair (gods I am so glad that those years are over, oh yes I am) and no, it's not super contagious as far as I can tell and so on and so forth but if you're really curious call me and I'll tell you. For the rest of you: it's going to cost more than half my monthly salary to have an exterminator in to get rid of them and since I've been trying in fits and starts to get rid of them myself for roughly 8 weeks now and failing and I've read and heard that getting rid of them by yourself is essentially impossible without throwing everything you own away and just starting from scratch, well, there goes that money.

On the bright side, that was the thousand bucks I was going to spend carpeting the basement and it's really a good thing that I didn't do that because a) bugs like carpet and b) if there had been carpet down there on Sunday night at 10:21 pm when the toilet did its highly successful Mt. Vesuvius impersonation, then that would have been Very Bad Indeed. Did you know that the lowest place in the basement is directly under the couch? Neither did I but it turns out that if you have an endless eruption of sewage to the tune of about 3" of sewage by the time you get the water turned off than most of it will flow downhill and under the couch.

Yeah, Sunday was just beautiful what with the bug and the sewage. So on Monday I stayed home from work and called an exterminator who came over and was very nice and explained that he would now take my huge sum of money and then come back on Thursday by which time, get this, I will have had to have taken (verb tense alert!) pretty much every thing made of cloth - every piece of clothing, every sheet, blanket, coat, scarf and dishtowel in the house - to the laundromat to run it all through a hot dryer for an hour. And if that shrinks my sweaters I am going to cry like a baby. Then I have to take the dogs to the vet (thank you kind vet!) and Pebble will have to be locked in the garage and Miles has to go somewhere else for the whole day while our entire house is saturated with highly toxic chemicals. Oh and I have to get any opened food containers into the garage as well AND, get this, I'm going to have to wash every plate, knife, fork, spoon, pan, etc unless I get them all into the garage as well. I wish to cry now.

And then on Monday I called a plumber. My friend Daniel told me to call the Rooter King, which I did, and the Rooter King (not sure if it was the King himself or just one of his minions, actually, perhaps a Minor Baron) showed up and proceeded to start the epic search for my sewer pipe. You see, my house was built in 1966 (which, coincidentally, is not very long after I myself was built) and in 1966 not only did they not have to put in sewer cleanout pipes, but there was nothing downhill behind my house but woods and more woods. Therefore, where my sewer pipe goes is one of the Great Mysteries and how long it takes before it gets to the city sewers is another of those Mysteries.

So the plumber walked around the neighborhood for a while and then his friend from the Sewage Department came by in a city truck to stand around and opine about how it was different back then for a while. Then he left and the plumber walked my yard for a long time with a long metal stick, poking it into the ground until he found the pipe. He said that God helped him find the pipe which, go figure, did not fill me with confidence, because I sort of feel that God Almighty, Jehovah, Lord of the Israelites and so on, should perhaps have better things to do with his time than worry about the state of the plumbing in Asheville, North Carolina. I mean, you know, maybe think about starving kids or something? Anyway, it turns out that my pipe is currently working but that state of affairs is not guaranteed to last but, on the bright side, it might! Even though the pipe is supposed to be round and now, by virtue of being so old and underground, is more oval! So I gave him $85 and that was that.

Like I said, Monday sucked. Tuesday has been OK; Wednesday and Thursday are looking like they're going to exhibit a fair to high amount of suckage and Friday? Please come, oh Friday, please come my way soon.