Having your toilet explode is a sure-fire cure for mid-week boredom. Strap on your snorkle mask, Felix, we're going swimming!
OK, I'm being overly dramatic. It wasn't that bad.
It was this bad!
jk.
Truth: I went to flush the toilet and it just kept flushing. And flushing. And flushing. And there was no shut off valve thingy down by the floor where there should be such a valve thingy.
So I took off the back of the toilet to mess with some stuff. I guess I messed with the wrong stuff, cuz the next thing I knew there was a geyser shooting water all over the bathroom. It was spraying up with ferocious force to the ceiling and raining back down all over me and everything else in the bathroom. Then the water started pouring out into the hall and our bedroom. Oh man. It's like 6:05 so I have to find the number for the after-hours emergency maintenance service, which takes a little longer. Not a big deal if you jammed a sippy cup valve down your garbage disposal. It is a big deal if Lake Michigan is being siphoned into your apartment at a brisk clip.
So finally the guy arrives to shut off the toilet. (It takes him a couple of trips to his truck to find the right special tool to shut the thing off. Toilet valves are not a cute place to showcase your proprietary designs, Mr. Toilet-maker.) And we're left with a couple of inches of standing water and a bathroom that has become a family-size shower.
Luckily, Woodbury Gardens called a carpet cleaner guy and footed the bill to have our carpet ripped up and padding replaced. Felix had a blast in our apartment-turn-funhouse--climbing through the piles of furniture and running over the undulating sea of carpet, drying out for four days by six of these bad boys:
They're loud. But they're better than the alternative!
Felix calls it the "blue home-again" because when Grandma Polly came to visit a while ago, she would always chant, "Home again, home again, jiggity-jig" as we pulled in the parking lot".