here in my head

I’m getting tired of having strange men in my house putting holes in my walls. First we had the electricians who tore my house apart for two weeks, taking out all the old, uninsurable knob and tube wiring from the entire house and replacing it with new, up-to-date, yes-we’ll-give-you-homeowners-insurance wiring, leaving many, many holes in almost every room in my beautiful, new-to-me home. Then it was the idiot workmen sent to us by the company where we bought the in-wall speakers Mike so desperately craved. Who cut holes without measuring and tried to force the speakers into spots where they clearly wouldn’t fit. Two new workmen and four upgraded speakers later, the company made up for the initial blundering fools, but we still had much patching to fix the original mistakes. Then there were the weeks of dusting up the never-ending construction silt that settled on every available surface and clogged my sinuses. But really, it was a small price to pay for up-to-code electricity and delicious sound on the main floor.

And then we come to last night, when Mike, trying hard to hide the tremor of slight panic in his voice with little success, called up from the basement: “Um, honey. We have a leak…”

It turns out that Ottawa has some very good, very friendly, plumbers that will come to your house at 10:30 p.m. to check out why, all of a sudden, you have water dripping from the ceiling in your basement. And will scare you silly with words like “full pipe replacement” and “this looks like it’s been happening for a while” and “how long have you owned this house? Three months? Yikes.” Luckily, in the fresh light of day, when another plumber had the chance to really take a close look at what was going on (by punching new, big, fancy holes in my recently patched walls, and a few new holes in my previously untouched kitchen ceiling…) it was not a full pipe replacement that was needed, no, but rather just the replacement of the part that connects the tub drain to the main drain pipe. That was what had malfunctioned. But, while the “full pipe replacement” words turned out to be wrong, sadly the “this looks like it’s been happening for a while” words were confirmed. It looks like more holes will have to be made, once more. Whole walls may need to be replaced, in fact.

I guess I can be glad we didn’t get around to painting yet. Ah yes, the brightside…

In other news, I have discovered Vodka Gimlets. This couldn’t have happened at a better time.