Not just any laundry room flood.......

A great flood came upon 526 E 13th street on the musky, damp evening of June 24, 2010. I came home from a lovely dinner with dad—stuffed like a roasted pig—and picked up the house a bit. I decided to wash my pillow from the DMB weekend, which was still waiting to be washed clean of the urine/mud/beer muck that was sure to become permanent without immediate attention. About 30 minutes later I come down to check on the laundry and to my surprise, my foot landed not on solid ground of the laundry room floor, but a small puddle of water. “Really??” I thought. Someone spilt a drink and didn’t clean it up—not that I was particularly surprised. Our lifestyle at the house is not much different than that of a gang of sloths, minus the full-coverage body hair (well, for some of us…) Sloths or not, when I reach for a dirty towel on the ground to wipe up what I thought was a spilled drink, my hand is met by a sopping wet towel which, I immediately realized, was just one of many soaking wet towels. And of many tee shirts, blankets, underwear, and dresses! I bang in the washer knob to stop the watermill, but the sound of trickling water continues as the flood empties into the air duct. I leap over the rushing stream which has picked up steam, collecting random dryer sheets and lint balls along its path to the underground oasis. I scream for Heather to help and we literally stare at one another with not a clue of what to do. Do we laugh? Do we curse our landlords? Do we sleep on the situation and decide in the morning? After considering the options internally (and lingering a bit too long on the last one), we aired on the side of practicality—we used Melissa’s clothes to mop up what we could, put the sopping wet cotton into trashbags on the porch, and took up our respective mops. For what it is worth, we got that laundry room looking spick and span. We knew that since our landlords were going to be coming over that the scene of the crime needed to be flawless. In fact, Heather and I proceeded to spend the next hour making sure the house was picked up enough so that Norm and Brian wouldn’t have a shit fit the next day. It isn’t our washer and I was only doing a load of laundry—clearly this is not our fault. But for good measure and an added kick in our own ass, we made the house look exceptionally hygienic. The clean(er) smell of the downstairs no longer resembles urine and rotting sandwich meat—a first for our humble abode on 13th. First a dead bird, now a flooded laundry room…should I be concerned that troubling predicaments continue to compound my weekly routines?????