I can do the laundry AND flush the toilet at the same time!

I will spare you the other photo of the day, which I emailed to Tim after — wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Suffice to say that by the end of this day, I really wanted this beer, and I really wish I liked it more than I did. I need to remember that I don’t really like beer all that much, even though I say I do; I’m really more of a cider girl. It wasn’t a bad beer, it was just very… hoppy.

So, let’s see; what was on my list for yesterday? Pour greenware that I didn’t pour on Tuesday. Wrap soap to take to Ingenue Avenue in the afternoon, which was hopefully dry by now since I’d sealed it up to get it away from the crazy humidity we’ve been having. Finish dyeing the yarn I didn’t finish Monday because of the leak in the dye bar sink. Start dyeing the March club yarn. Keep working on a replacement piece for a customer even though I hadn’t heard back from her yet about whether or not she wanted a slightly different thing I could send her now, or something exactly the same that I’d have to make (it would sell anyway, so I opted for making).

So I poured the greenware first, as that has the longest “wait” time (at the same time, I turned the dye pots on to heat up, since that would take at least an hour). Then I went to wrap soap, because that had a time limit of 2 PM. Except that even with sealing it up overnight, it was still too damp to wrap. So that went back in the box, but as I still had other things for Ingenue Avenue, I wasn’t worried I was dropping the ball on them. I worked on the yarn, and then went to choose what’s next on the paint-and-glaze list of ceramics, while waiting for the dye to set. And then… when the water was ready to pour out… I discovered that the dye bar sink pipes were leaking. Even worse than they were the day before. Dye pots off — I finished the February colorway for the shop, but didn’t want to risk starting the March yarn club color. So what am I going to do with the rest of my day, then? It wasn’t even 11 AM yet. I decided to start getting January yarn club ready to mail out, because that would save me some time today… but first, I decided to go look at some pipe stuff outside.

There’s a pipe with a cap close to the house, and I didn’t know if Tim had looked at it. He’d said that when he’d snaked the tub a couple days ago, that he couldn’t reach the clog, and I didn’t know if maybe he could reach the clog from there….? So I went and uncapped the pipe, and water immediately roiled up out of the pipe. That thing was FULL. But not disgusting, just kind of cloudy. While I was out there thinking “hmm,” I remembered the original owners of the house telling me there’s another pipe, with no cap, back in the far left corner of the yard. So I went back there, got a few feet away from where it is, and my thought process was one of “what is that horrible smell- what, flies? – what is that – oh.my.god”. Of course I went and got my camera (I will, however, spare you the photo). I sent it to Tim, who was at work, and was all, “well, THERE’S our problem.” And then I immediately fell into a well of despair as I thought about the potential hundreds and hundreds of dollars that this was going to take to fix.

However, when I asked on Facebook if some of my friends who are or are married to city/county workers thought I should call GRU (the local water and power company) before a plumber, as the mess was right on the boundary line, and appeared to have backed up in our yard because of something that happened between where it happened and the city sewer line, not between where it happened at the house… most people were all, “Call GRU!”. So Tim came home from work, we both kind of freaked out in our quiet ways, and then he called GRU and made lunch. YEAH. ALL OF THIS WAS EVEN BEFORE NOON. It’s a wonder I wasn’t drunk by 3.

I emailed Ingenue Avenue and apologized, but restocks were going to have to wait. And then we waited for GRU to show up… which it did, in mere minutes, in the form of my friend Katherine’s husband, Andy. I already knew that Andy rocks like a big rocking thing that rocks a lot, because I’ve been up to he and Katherine’s house plenty of times and seen the work that he did. So Andy knows his stuff, is where I’m going with this. So when he started asking if it was terra cotta or PVC, and that we might need to consider running an entire new pipe from the house to the end of the yard — well, I think I may have blacked out for a second. I mean, I’m very glad that he said that, because I went into what happened next with a worst-case-scenario in my head, and I’d rather be prepared for the worst than surprised by it, know what I mean? But still. The dollar signs in my head went from hundreds to thousands, and I started thinking about how much a kidney could fetch on the black market.

So when the guy Andy called showed up, I was prepared for doom and gloom and the poop apocalypse. What we got was about 20 minutes of waiting for another guy with a truck to show up, and about ten minutes of the most bad-ass hose in town scrubbing the heck out of the pipe, I’m guessing near the junction of where our pipe meets their pipe. And then they were done! And the really nice guy who did the work said that he’d send someone round in a couple days to saw off the top of the pipe and put a new cap on it (they don’t make the old cap any more). But then not even an hour later, he showed back up with an old cap! He’d been at another job, casually asked if the guys had an old cap in the truck, and they did! So he ran it by the house! Man. Those GRU guys need some home-baked cookies.

So all-in-all, it could have been a lot worse. It sure was worse in my head, and we all know from reading The Phantom Tollbooth that jumping to the island of conclusions takes days to swim back from. Not a lot of sleep the night before, coupled with a dip in the emotional doom pond, made for a really tired and cranky me by the end of the day. But today is a new day, and all that jazz. Hooray! I can flush the toilets! I can dye yarn! It’s a good day.