Expectations

On Monday, the kids were playing together so wonderfully all day. They invented games, Amelia created a whole population of origami people, they played in the yard, they played in the house and they smiled all day until it came to the time when I said that we really need to go run these errands because these books are already overdue and I need to get to the bank machine. "Mom! Must we? We want to stay home all day! Why do we always have to go somewhere?!!"

Picture Tuesday. A day with no errands. A clean, crisp, blank day.

Filled with whiny, sulky, argumentative children who couldn't be left in a room together for more than a few minutes without some sort of altercation breaking out. (you knew that was coming, right? Hell, I knew it was coming. I just deceived myself that somehow the Monday magic would last.)

So, after adjudicating the billionth argument between the kids, I returned to scrubbing the grime off the gas cooktop and degreasing the hood. This was kind of satisfying work because you could see the progress but it was also monotonous and Hornblower sometimes gets bored easily. Just as the first burst of energy (made up mostly of exasperation at dealing with the kids) was wearing off, fortune intervened with some excitement.

HMS Indefatigable sprung a leak.

Sudden gush of water coming out from under the sink, soaking my pantlegs, flooding the floor and gushing all over. I dove under the sink and it was immediately apparent what the problem was.

The previous owners had installed a reverse osmosis filtration system under the sink. (Why remains a mystery because our municipal water is damn good.) It kind of looks like this except what's missing in that picture is a huge rats nest of small plastic tubing in various colors, coming and going all over the place. One of these tubes had become detached and was geysering all over the place.

I like to think I'm good in an emergency. I dove under the sink, scooped out all the crap in my way, tried to crimp that hose with one hand and grabbed the blue cold water shut-off knob with the other. That knob is awfully old looking and for a moment a feeling of dread settled in my stomach because I know these can snap right off and I just realized that I had no clue where the main water shut off for the house is. I gave it a gentle turn and hallelujah, it turned nicely, so I quickly closed it.

But the water was still coming. Which is when it registered that the pipe I had just shut off, the one with the old, scratched up, but still recognizably BLUE knob, was connected with a T to the dishwasher. Dishwashers are generally connected to hot water; ergo, this was the hot water pipe and as it was the cold water that was connected to the filter, I hadn't done anything helpful yet.

I shoved the garbage can under the squirting hose and dove in again to find the other pipe, the one with, yes, the very RED knob, which, is actually not very close to the other pipe and which I had to reach around the other side of the big giant water storage tank filtration thingy to get at, and finally shut the cold water off, and started mopping things up.

That was fun. Nothing like labelling your cold pipes with red, and hot pipes with blue.

No major damage done except the parquet floor has a small buckle in it now, even though it was probably only a few litres that spilled and I mopped it up quickly. Ah well.

As for the rest of the day? The gasfitter guy replaced 2 leaky valves. He has to come back again once he's ordered a replacement (& probably expensive) part for the furnace (which is only a couple years old but apparently that part is not under warranty). The gasfitter charges $135 an hour for labour. Ahem.

Then the pest guy came. At least he charges per job.

Neither one of them looks like or sounds like or is remotely like Andrew Dan-Jumbo.