Destructive Weekend

It started on Thursday afternoon when I sliced a little bit off the tip of my left index finger. I was making soup and rushing to get the spinach chopped. The knife was very sharp. Next thing I knew I had chopped not only the spinach, but also a bit of my finger right off. Gone. It bled a lot. I immediately pressed a paper towel against the tip of my finger and, while compressing, somehow finished up the soup. Afterwards I gingerly I pulled back the paper towel to examine my filleted flesh. I glanced away for a moment to open the Neosporin and by the time I looked back my finger was covered in blood again. I compressed the finger for a while longer while I ate my lunch. Eventually I was able to get the bleeding stopped and the injured finger bandaged, but it hurt like $#@&. Thankfully I didn’t have to do any massage until today, Monday, and it seems to have healed very well.

Next was the fireplace Saturday evening. My Christopher and I arrived at his home late in the evening to find his roommate Bart steeping in a smoke filled room. After about five minutes my eyes started burning and I was coughing a bit. How Bart was able to loll around in that environment all afternoon and evening is beyond me, but we opened up all the doors and windows until the house was habitable again. The fire didn’t seem to be leaking smoke from anywhere so we just assumed that smoke had gotten into the room when the door was opened to stoke the fire. When we added logs, however, our assumption proved false. Smoke immediately started seeping from the top joint of the chimney despite no apparent crack or misalignment. Christopher, being the handy hunk that he is, made his way up onto the roof (at 10pm in 25 degree weather) and found the top of the chimney to be totally caked with soot, thus greatly diminishing the ability of the smoke to exit the chimney. He was able to clean it out, we aired out the house again and 40 minutes later were settled back into our movie.

Sunday morning Christopher discovered his carboy (a five-gallon container for fermenting beer in) was full of ice. He’d set it out with water in it a couple of weeks ago and forgotten to clean it out. In the meantime the water had turned to ice because of the weeklong cold snap. After setting the carboy in the bathtub to thaw out he noticed a crack running along the side. As the carboy defrosted, water started seeping out that crack and others while the glass container sort of dissolved around it. The bathtub isn’t the best place to have a five-gallon, inch-thick glass container dissolve into numerous pieces large and small. Christopher carefully picked up all the pieces and so far we’ve only found two stray bits. One Bart found right by the toilet and one we found embedded in Christopher’s slipper. I’m planning on keeping my slippers or shoes on at all times in the bathroom. This might be a challenge when bathing, but I don’t want my feet to wind up like my finger.

Sunday evening Christopher came with me to my parents’ house where I’m residing until I move to Portland. I don’t spend a whole lot of time there because it is rather cold (I don’t want to heat up their whole big house) and because it is sort of far away from everything (like the gym, yoga, the track, grocery stores, things to do, etc.) Also Chris doesn’t come down too often because his puppy-dog Samson needs to be taken care of. Last night, however, we left Sam with Bart and headed down to my parents’ place. Thank goodness he came with me as we discovered the outdoor shower was gushing water. It turns out the valve inside the faucet-thingy busted, probably because of the cold. It was mostly hot water that was gushing out so first Christopher turned off the hot water. Then it was still pouring out so we had to turn all the water off. Turning all the water off proved quite challenging as the water main was buried in the yard. Something had shifted after it was installed so the casing around the water main had shifted, making it flush with the handle and making it impossible to turn the water off. In the dark we were digging and pulling and digging and pulling (all in the 25 degree air with frozen ground) until we were finally able to turn the handle and shut off the water. Handy hunk Christopher took apart the faucet and valve, discovered the problem, and MacGyver-style fashioned a plug out of a latex glove and was able to stop up the faucet so we could turn the water back on so that we could eat, drink, do dishes, laundry, bathe and all those other things that require water and which we take for granted. This all took about an hour and a half.

Finally we’d finished our movie (started Saturday night before the chimney incident), finished dinner, had a couple of sorely needed stiff drinks, and were taking the garbage and recycling down the driveway for pickup the next morning. I was dragging the trash down the long driveway when I heard a crash immediately followed by swearing. The bag Christopher was carrying down had broken, releasing half a dozen glass bottles into the starry night. I watched as they rolled down the steep driveway, tinkling and pinging as they danced along until finally shattering and smashing along and beside the driveway. After retrieving the flashlight for the second time that night and another plastic bag, we carefully picked up all the little shards of glass. Or at least I hope we picked up all the little shards of glass. By this point I was sort of laughing hysterically while swearing cheerfully. I was so cold and so tired and we had been dealing with these sorts of things for far too long. Going to bed, with the electric blanket and everything, was such a relief.

I escaped this destructive weekend and am now at the office where I do massage 1 1/2 days each week. It is about 40 degrees in here and just as I finished setting up I discovered my 9am client had called around 7:30 to cancel. I think there also may be a frozen or broken pipe here as I tried to fill my water bottle and found there was no water. At least this gives me the time to recount my adventurous weekend and call the plumber I would like to come fix the faucet. In general, however, I don’t really need all this in this very busy last week of mine before moving and starting my new job.