I don’t want a house. Houses are expensive, and very breakable.* Too many things can go wrong with a house, and when it does, you can’t just call up the Maintenance Guy Who Always Wears Shorts Even When He’s Shovelling Snow and be all like “Um, my garbage disposal sounds like someone hid a cat in there.”
No. Instead you have to figure out how to fix the problem yourself, and then call someone to come fix the fixing you attempted, a process which generally costs somewhere in the Four- to Fifty-Billion dollar range.
Really, the only good I can see coming from home ownership is being able to drum up sympathy from your friends when things go horribly wrong. Like if Killer Bees took up residence in your chimney, or Gary Busey moved in next door.
Or, as in the case of my parents’ home this morning, Enchanted Tree Roots waging war against the pipes-or-whatever that lead away from the house and toward the sewer lines, causing a bunch of Nastiness to get all up where it don’t belong.
The initial text exchange:
Juanita: WE HAVE A SEWER BACKUP IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM
Me: Oh no.
J: OH NO IS RIGHT
I vaguely offered my assistance in a “what can I do? And please don’t ask me to come over and mop up the shit water” kind of way, but was (thankfully) declined.
om nom nom nom nom!
Time passes, and Juanita calls with an update. After my father vacuumed up the laundry room floor, he found something curious inside the ShopVac.
“Are these yours?” he asks my mom, holding a decimated pair of women’s underthings.
“Um, no.” she responds.
She tells me this, and my brain begins to fill with questions:
1. When did I decide to stuff my underthings into the floor drain?
2. …or hide them in the ShopVac?
3. Which pair? Were they cute? If so, can they be saved?
As the drain cover was never removed during the clean-up efforts, the unfortunately-mundane conclusion is that, at some point, some errant laundry never made it through the washer-to-dryer or dryer-to-basket transition and got kicked behind something-or-another, only to be discovered many months (I moved out in May!) later in the reservoir of my dad’s ShopVac. The pair in question appears to have not caused the back-up.
Which is unfortunate, because that would have been a hell of a story.
*See also: fine china, children, small dogs.
* * * * *
UPDATE:
our most recent text exchange:
J: DAN THE PIPE MAN IS HERE
Me: I really hope that’s what’s written on his truck.
the sloppy copy 