Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I think I'm entitled to some whining this morning.

I would like to have gone with my housemate to his PhD dissertation defense today (and he would have appreciated my taking pictures), but I guess it's a good thing neither of us were counting on that (my body is awfully damned unreliable as early in the morning as he was planning to leave). So here's how it unfolded from my point of view:

I took my sleep meds earlier than I usually do, hoping that This Time they'd actually put me to sleep instead of just helping me along when I was already close to it, for a change. To give the sleep meds a fighting chance, dinner was egg+cheese+potato, for the tryptophan. I, uh, think I may have sortakinda almost felt the drugs go by my brain on their way from my stomach to my kidneys, as there was a half hour or so in there, starting a while after I took them, when I did start to feel just a wee bit drowsy (not ehnough so to make me pull over if I'd been driving, mind you). But that passed.

(Note that I get terribly sleepy at the wrong times. So I miss some things because my body decides to fall over in the afternoon.)

So. Lying awake in the dark. Trying to figure things that might lutll myself to sleep. Finally start nodding off just as the alarm rings at six, and then fall asleep, feeling by then too damned tired from having been awake at night. Think, "well maybe a really short nap and I can get up and get ready in a hurry". ("Wanna see me pull a rabbit out of a hat?" "That trick never works." "This time for sure!")

Oh, but some part of me was still trying to wake up and get ready eeven in my sleep, I guess, because I woke up very quickly when my housemate tapped on my bedroom doorframe to tell me, on his way out of the house, that the hot water shutoff to the shower had broken, and water was gushing and wouldn't stop. He asked whether there was yet another shutoff valve upstream from that one, and I said, "Yeah, in the basement," and when I found out that he had been planning to leave Right Then (at that point I still kinda hoped I could just get ready Really Really Quickly if I woke up just a leeetle bit more), I said I'd take care of it -- his being made late to his defense and probably frazzled, by spending time tracing pipes in my basement, would have been a very bad thing, and groggy as I was, I was awake enough to realize that.

So he dashed off and I pried myself out of bed to find out what "Gushing. Well not exactly gushing, but it's a lot," meant. (I'm inclined to call it gushing. It wasn't coming out As Fast As Possible (y'know, with all valves wide open), but it was a lot closer to that than it was to being a trickle or a quiet little column of water. I think that when it makes a whooshing sound we're allowed to call it gushing, right? I mean, I was standing there thinking, "If this were blood instead of water, this rate of blood loss would kill an elephant pretty quick. Enough flow to bleed out an elephant ought to be called 'gushing'." (I do not claim to have been absolutely 100% awake when I thought that, despite being out of bed and standing upright.)

You see, the hot water tap for the tub/shower had started leaking a while ago, and while I suspect it just needs a new washer, I never did figure out how to get it apart (all I managed was to get the knob off), so when that became a trickle instead of a drip, I started using the shutoff valve on the pipe where it came out of the floor outside the tub. (This is a freestanding clawfooted tub, not a built-into-the-wall thing, with a shower modification added sometime before I moved in but late enough that the box it came in was still around then.) That external cutoff valve was what had now died.

So I used the toilet and washed my hands in lukewarm water (the actually-hot water all having drained away long since) because I knew where the next valve in the line had to be, and I wouldn't have any hot water at all to wash my hands with for a while. For some silly reason I expected there to be a valve on the hot side of the water heater, but (duh) it's on the cold side. And yes, I did remember, a few minutes later, to turn off the water heater's gas so it wouldn't try to heat an empty tank and do goodness-knows what damage.

Now I'm sitting here, with no hot water and having had only seventy five minutes of sleep all night, trying to wake up enough to make a rational decision regarding whether to start phoning plumbers and hope I can afford one or to fortify myself with homeowner DIY web sites and grab a wrench and possibly make a mess (with lots of one-liners about plumbers having to work harder because of not being called until after a do-it-yourselfer screwed things up, but also with memories of my father and an ex-housemate making the process of repairing a faucet seem really straightforward). And whining here until my brain catches up.

So I don't get to hear my housemate's presentation for his defense, nor do I get the needed sleep that had looked like the alternative. He'd better really kick butt in there -- I'm gonna need something to celebrate by the time today is over. He should be starting about five minutes after I post this. He should have started about five minutes ago (first attempt to post this didn't work.)

(And Perrine, of course, having observed people Up And About really early, has decided that it must therefore be Time To Feed The Cat, and has been nagging me about that,)