There are certain ways in which it is pleasant to wake up.
Breakfast in bed is nice.
Slowly surfacing from slumber snuggled in soft sheets is splendid.
Even just…waking up after a night of restful sleep to the smell of fresh coffee. Totally acceptable.
A less acceptable way to wake up is struggling out of dreams to the sound of your name called from another room in a tone that sounds somewhat urgent, stumbling blearily out of bed and stepping out of the bedroom doorway onto a confusingly cold and squelchy carpet. And then forward onto the linoleum floor, which your brain is beginning to process is covered in an inch or so of rather chilly water.
Apparently, at some point last night, Robin aided a framed painting I had hanging behind the toilet to…no longer be so much hanging as plummeting. Unfortunately, the exciting journey which said painting was enjoying was curtailed by it’s disastrous collision with the PVC pipe which fed water into the toilet. What followed was…well…squelchiness.
It could have been worse — first of all, that cold and soggy floor COULD have been soaked in something less benign than clean water. It could have been the congealing blood of a congressman unaccountably murdered in our living room in the middle of the night…slightly more realistically, it could have been fluid that had already passed through the toilet rather than just entering the tank. And aside from a few galley books, I think we mostly suffer from from some very wet carpet and rather wet clothing. Heck, I needed to clean out the closet and spare room anyway. Burgandy is bringing over her shop vac and Anna is going to loan us her dehumidifier, so we’ll have two going to suck moisture out of the damp house. And because this was his early day, Briggs was up at least an hour sooner than he would have been any other day, so that’s an hour of flooding curtailed. All in all, only about a third of the house is really wet, and most of that third was storage and such…it would have been nice if the part that flooded was the tile and linoleum portion with the drain, but fate was still kinder than it could have been.
However, the situation is undeniably inconvenient. First of all…did I mention that is NOT the way to wake up? And I know Briggs had it worse than I, as he had to wake up and not only encounter a horribly flooded house, but also deal with figuring out where the flood was coming from and how to make it stop. He had to call out of work, and I don’t know just how much homework I’m going to get done today, but it probably won’t be as much as I had initially planned. Our water is currently off, which is always so much more troublesome than one expects, and of course, the toilet is out of commission at the moment. Also, we have piles of mostly dry and slightly damp and a bit soggy stuff out on our porch, which will all need to be dealt with. We also have a good sized bag of various clothes and such that were on the floor of the closet that are more than a little damp, and will need to be sorted and washed.
All in all, this is not exactly how either of us wanted to spend our day.
And now the shop-vac has arrived and we can begin extracting moisture. Wish us luck.
the post-9/11 world regarding such things as the Patriot Act? I haven’t done any research for this post and am just writing off the cuff, but I think I recall that the PA includes such policies as the ability to take people into custody with no real proof and hold indefinitely if they, for example, say that they disagree with the way the government is running things…because saying the government is wrong is unpatriotic and could be a sign that someone’s a terrorist. The PA is considered by many to be largely unconstitutional and spit in the face of free speech, freedom of assembly and a bunch of other freedoms…and the PA is justified using similar arguments to the one my friend made, arguments saying that we have freedom of speech, as long as we stick to the approved topics.
I may consider their views bigoted, or small-minded or stupid, but they have the right to say those things, just as I have the right to tell them that I think they are wrong…but I don’t have the right to persecute them for what they say or think. I think I remember learning in third-grade history that one of the ideas that was supposed to have been behind the founding of this country was that everyone is entitled to think what they want (at least if they were white men;)) and the government couldn’t punish them for having different beliefs than other people.
