Wow, the lighting in my bathroom is unflattering! Oh well, it’s us in all of our cuteness. Like Mother like daughter. . .

Remember how I said everything was breaking? It still is. Tuesday night was so fun. We left the house to go for a walk to tire the kiddos out for bed and when I returned home I looked in our front window and noticed that not only was it raining outside, it was raining inside too! I went inside and surveyed the water flowing freely from the kitchen ceiling and pouring out of the light fixtures. I decided to drop the kids off at the neighbors before I took them inside to play with the dripping electrical fixtures.

Once inside I went upstairs to see if I could find out where the water was coming from. I was a little concerned that it was going to be a pipe in the wall and I would have to go outside and figure out how to turn the main waterline off, but upon entering the bathroom I figured out that the water was coming from the little pipe that attaches the toilet to the wall. How did I deduce this? It was spraying about five feet across the bathroom and hitting the cupboards, you couldn’t miss it. I sloshed through the two inches of water that was covering the floor and draining down the heating vent, and turned off the water. Then I called maintenance. The jerk who answered the phone barked out a few questions and then said someone would call me and hung up on me before I could enquire about a time frame. This is military housing. You never know what you are going to get so I had no idea if someone would be paged and call me immediately, or if someone would call me next week. I waited for fourty-five minutes and the same nice plumber who fixed the garbage disposal and unclogged our toilet the day before called and said he was on his way.

He is a really nice guy. He wet vac-ed the whole floor for me and then fixed my running toilet in addition to replacing the crap piece of piping that he couldn’t believe someone had actually used in the first place. (The government likes to cut corners on their military housing; just about everything looks like a strong wind could blow it over. They are building new housing right now, and when they put the chicken wire up to do the stucco over they decided to be cheap and not use enough stucco so now, after all the rain, you can see bits of rusty chicken wire poking out of the walls. Good job, cheapskates!) Anyway, the plumber was incredibly pleasant for someone working at ten at night. I suppose he was getting overtime, but still, I liked our plumber. Sometimes maintenance sends over creepy guys I’m not altogether comfortable having in the house when Chris isn’t home.

There is a hole in our kitchen ceiling and the paint is literally falling off of the walls in huge strips. I made then send an electrician to look at the lights. Now I’m just waiting for someone to come fix the ceiling. No major damage was done to anything of mine, although I did lose 3 packages of photo paper and my checkbook got doused. Mostly it was just a really big mess that I got to clean up. I really hope the paint was lead free because little bits of it got all over.