Yesterweek

You may have noticed that I spent the vast majority of this week looking backwards: Lost Dog and Lost Dog, Revisited; the political satires I read and watched up through last Friday; the blogging job I didn’t apply for. About the only current events I got into involved the birthday party we took the little guy to, and the clue there is the “took” part, as in, something which got us out of the house.

If it seemed like I was avoiding observing and/or commenting on what was going on around me at the time, that’s not an unfair assessment. It’s been a bit of a fuster around the old homestead this week. A minor malfunction of our dishwasher (which gets run pretty much every single day) resulted in lots of water leaking behind the walls and under the floor and into the ceiling of the basement, which is how I finally became aware of the situation when a saturated ceiling tile collapsed to the floor. Because you see it was one of those minor but insidious leaks, not enough to flood the kitchen in three inches of water but enough to do some damage to the hardwood floors, with the capacity for even more structural damage if we hadn’t caught it relatively early. (And by ‘we’ of course I mean ‘the plumber we had come over on Monday’.)


Thereafter began a round of calling the homeowners insurance people, who in turn called a water mitigation services company, who sent somebody out Tuesday evening to check the damage. He ended up leaving us with multiple industrial machines (dehumidifiers and circulator fans) which were to run round-the-clock drying out our floor as much as possible to limit the harm done. We were also instructed to order a replacement part for the dishwasher and not run it until the new part was installed. Said part was located Wednesday and takes six days to arrive, so we’ve been hand-washing dishes when we bother to use them (that birthday party really could not have been better timed as a way to get away from the racket in our kitchen and also have dinner taken care of; last night we had take-out and dirtied some plates but at least didn’t have to hand-scrub pots).

Today some of the fans were picked up and taken away but the floor was still reading as wet (according to some kind of resistivity measurer the water mitigation guy uses) so the dehumidifier stayed along with a couple fans in the basement pointed at the ceiling. The plan is to let the run over the weekend and be done with them by Monday, and hopefully we’ll have the dishwasher part by Tuesday to be installed … Thursday, I guess? The point being we’re getting there, but we’re not there yet. It’s fine, hardly the end of the world, and we will survive (and in theory get a nice brand new hardwood floor for the low, low price of our insurance deductable) but … you can probably expect me to blog mostly about abstract stuff for most of next week, too.