This was my third basement flood in two years, mind you — the previous two from hot-water heater eruptions, and now this cracked toilet regurgitated its contents just one week after a roof I was working on leaked and damaged a ceiling. Oh, and my nose has been running constantly too!
I wonder if Job had any plumbing disasters to go along with his festering boils and dead oxen? If not, boy will I have a story for him one day (if I don’t go to hell for swearing so much lately). After Job’s tale of woe, I’ll bellow, “BORING! Cry me a river, you lucky dog. I’d have traded my water plague for your little complexion problems in a New Delhi minute!”
I’ll tell him about roofing for Scott Davidson, who through no fault of his own — just at the wrong place at the wrong time — has been sucked into this Doug Blough curse. He’s certainly had the patience of Job through this month-long nightmare, during which he’s incurred ceiling damage, had his garage door blocked for weeks by a huge rented dumpster and his lawn ravaged when the ground finally thawed and the driver took an ill-advised shortcut when removing the enormous receptacle.
Scott had sent me an ironic-in-retrospect text in mid-November, the morning after the first big snow, which followed a week of 50 mph winds. He wrote, “Should I be worried? Lol.” I replied with uncharacteristic confidence, “Naaah, everything on top is felted and the lower roof securely awaits.”
But days later, a guy I hired for a day began removing shingles on the lower section, oblivious to the slow-but-constant drip from the melting upper roof snow landing on bare plywood. I had arrived just before Scott came home from his Cody Dairy/Big Horn Wholesale enterprise, and soon after going in, re-appeared saying, “I’m afraid we have a little problem in there.” With gut-knotted dread, I scampered down and followed him inside to see a gaggle of brown spots on his gorgeous acoustic ceiling.
A dry-wall contractor has given me a repair estimate, and I’ll seek another from a landscaper — the extent depending greatly on any sprinkler damage uncovered — for the 2-foot-deep ruts carved from that hasty driver. Days later when a second snowstorm struck to prolong this roofing nightmare, I reassured Scott with this calming text: “Don’t worry. As you know, I keep a sheet-rocker on retainer.”
And then came the Great Porcelain Tsunami. The Bible speaks of end times when natural disasters will strike so frequent and unrelenting that man will be “unable to gain a foothold.” The end must be near, because just as I began to let my guard down, I entered the john for a 3 a.m. tinkle and sloshed into water nearly up to my ankles. Now, I’m no plumber (just a roofer … and a darn good one!), but I instinctively knew to search for a valve near the toilet. I had forgotten the old, “righty tighty; lefty loosey” adage though, and inexplicably went with the opposite.
Unknowingly, I had further opened the floodgates as I sunk back into slumber, so by noon when I got up, the stinky wetness of the carpet had bled nearly to my couch haven and the basement was literal pond scum. My unfortunate next-door townhouse neighbors of two years, Shani and Eric, are also unwitting victims of my ripple effect curse. Shani soon called to report odors emanating into their basement again.
I’ve never been an expectant mother, but hear that odors seem intensified and less tolerable when pregnant. Ironically, Shani was also pregnant two years ago when my basement flooded the first time. So as bad as I feel about these nice people constantly under siege from my damp, smelly adjoining world, I asked Shani only half-jokingly, “How come every time you get pregnant, my water breaks?!”
I finally finished Scott’s roof after a month of snow, wind, mishap and mayhem, and via endless Shop-Vac hours, the smell of my townhouse has almost returned to its normal, bearable stench. But a new year cometh, bringing desperate hope that this insidious curse will end after two long-suffering years.
Or will God tell Satan on New Year’s Eve, “OK, you only have eight more years left on the decade we agreed upon to sift him like wheat. The water thing is fine, but you shall not harm a thinning hair on his head. And his oxen are off-limits!”