Crazy Stable

...this time, in the second-floor laundry room (seen below).

The day started with a loathsome trip to the basement to throw bleach in the remaining Roto-Rooter puddles (and open the windows so the dank dungeon could start drying out, something neither Spouse nor Roto-Guy had thought to do). Finally, with some surcease of rain, I eagerly started doing the piled-up laundry...because, since the laundry-room ceiling has been leaking in earnest, I am now unable to do wash when it rains. (Unless one's idea of the "rinse cycle" is roof tea dripping on clean wash.) After slipping on a puddle, I sorrowfully noted that there was a slick of water under the trusty Sears Kenmore. Damn, how did roof tea escape the foil roasting pans and get under there?

But no, it was a Third Manifestation of Bad Waters: The trusty Kenmore is now refluxing water from its drainpipe. Damage to the laundry room is the least of my worries (it's already a mess from the roof leak)--but this is a potential assault on the spanking new plastering job directly beneath, in Nice Tenant's apartment. After applying sopping rags, I placed a call to our Noble Plumber, Vinnie, who will come at 7:30 tomorrow morning to diagnose.

Maybe it will be some minor thing, or maybe the Kenmore's day has come. Either way, it disturbingly illustrates a phenomenon long observed here: the Evil Interconnectedness of Things. The tiresome cliche for this phenomenon, "it never rains but it pours," may be apt, but it does not address my paranoid convictions that the CrazyStable is periodically possessed by squalid little domestic demons working in concert. Historically, one such unholy alliance has been observed between the automobile and the boiler; one seldom malfunctions without the other joining it. (Presumably, when the transmission conks out, the car murmurs incantations from the driveway into the basement, bewitching the ignition switch or some other critical component to join it in sympathy and really wipe us out. Or maybe the boiler does juju on the car.)

This week, we see a clear example of an evil swamp spirit, conjured perhaps by the recent torrents and nurtured by the awful humidity, invoking floods all over the damn house. I half expect brackish water to start pouring out of my hard drive. I had somehow pictured this week devoted to gardening and iced-tea-quaffing, as opposed to marsh-mopping and bleach-tossing. 

Lady, come from that nest 

Of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep: 

A greater power than we can contradict 

Hath thwarted our intents: come, come away.

 Image: the Midgewater Marshes. By way of: The Thain’s Book: An encyclopedia of Middle-Earth in the Third Age