So last night I was about to go to bed, and I went to my bathroom to insure a good night’s sleep. What should I discover but that the toilet (installed in 1974) was plugged? It didn’t look very serious, and about two thirds of the time in our (built in 1997) apartment another flush would solve the problem - so flush I did. As usual, I pulled the things on the floor (pantyhose, dress shoes, and a box full of as-yet-unpacked bathroom oddments) away from the toilet just in case that overflowy thing wasn’t just in movies and one very fuzzy memory from my early childhood. Of course, the inexorable march of the toilet water did continue well past the level of a normal toilet, and I backed, hands crammed with stuff, towards the door, only to discover it wedged closed. With an animal growl I managed to unwedge the bath mat that was blocking the door and kick it outside as I dropped my other burdens and hollered frantically for Matt.

Luckily, Matt must have watched movies or had memories where the overflowing of the toilet was not just an inevitable expression of modern man’s ineptitude and frailty, because he splashed into the bathroom (the water by this point lapping at the hall carpet) and cranked the water off at the wall.

So at this point I had to sop up the water - pretty much clean, but still, it came from the toilet! - with dirty towels and the mop. To my mortification, I discovered that while the water was clean, the hall carpet has probably never been shampooed since 1974. It stained the towels, and a paper towel pressed to the wet spot came up brown. Now, now, don’t think of it that way. I smelled it - it was dust. A truly monumental amount of dust.

On the upside, the toilet had cleared, so I turned that back on at the wall and flushed a time or two for good measure. So then I mopped with Lysol, washed my feet in the tub to get the presumed germs off, padded across the Lysolly floor, jumped over the wet part of the carpet, still soaking through paper towels and hopefully air-drying, and washed the Lysol off my feet in MATT’s bathtub. “You know,” I remarked to Matt, “Not only am I tired and cranky, but I had to go to the bathroom BEFORE this all happened.”

The joys of home ownership…