Today was a rollercoaster of a day. The twins had a friend spend the night last night, and the morning breakfast time was a cacophony of calls for waffle adornments, with syrup, preserves and jam flying from one side of the table to the other at the speed of light. I joined in with the morning banter while I did dishes, and that is when all hell broke loose. My laundry room is in my kitchen, just to the right of the car port door, and in front of the table. I had the dishwasher running, and was putting some sort of vegetable matter down the disposal when Old Faithful relocated from Yellowstone park to behind my washing machine. Water exploded from the drain for the washing machine, drenching everything in that half of the room. At the same time the sinks both started to back up and the dishwasher made an ominous grumbling sound as gray water backed into it and splashed my in-the-process-of-getting-clean dishes. Screams of surprise and horror issued forth from teens, who were now facing waffles drenched in gray water, and dripping themselves.
This was not good.
I shut off everything in the kitchen, yelled for Hubby, and then panicked. This occurred about 3 hours before Hubby and I were to go in for the child board regarding #3. Our grip on normalcy was tenuous to begin with, and this caused that grip to slip and we tumbled into bedlam.
I called the maintenance folks and explained what happened. Fortunately for us they were just up the street at another house with a remarkably similar problem. They arrived around noon, and after an hour of snaking the drain, and much cursing, they finally fixed the problem. It seems that we are not the only ones experiencing this type of thing. The housing we are in is quite old, and since it was built in the early 50’s, the plumbing has never been updated. It seems that all of the pipes leading from the houses to the street are competing with the root systems of all the trees that were planted throughout the last 50+ years. In our case, the clog was out in the street, and it was comprised of a knot of roots that almost completely obstructed the piping. The maintenance men were amazed that we had not had serious problems prior to this.
That got fixed, we went to the board and addressed the situation, came home and drank chocolate milkshakes that were laced heavily with rum, and now, this evening I am more than ready to fall into a deep sleep that lasts for days... or at least until 9 or 10 tomorrow morning.
The bedroom scouring I had planned for today will have to be attempted sometime next week. Today was definitely not the day to do it.