Hurricane Drill

I am not going to find this funny for another 6 weeks at least. But on the off chance that perhaps you can find humor in it, I am posting it for your delight and edification so long as you promise not to try to make me laugh about it.

You may recall that my office is on the ground floor of our house, with the rest of the house raised above it (with the exception of the Man Cave, which is right next door to my office). What you will not recall (because I have never told you) is that there is a bathroom directly above my office. When we renovated this house, we pretty much took all the toilets that were already in the house and moved them around because Flamingo Joe convinced me that they were all $500 toilets.

The toilet that is directly above my office is possessed. It backs up for no reason and threatens to overflow on a regular basis, so you have to watch it carefully after you flush. And while it's not really high-class to have a plunger sitting right beside the toilet, it has saved us on more than one occasion.

At about 4:00 this afternoon, Casey used the bathroom (and only because it's pertinent information for you to have later, I will tell you that he only went #1 and nothing else). At about 4:20, I was in the kitchen and Grandma was in the den. I heard Mace go to Grandma and say, "Gamma -- water!" So Grandma gets up and walks down the hall to the bathroom. I hear her say, "Oh yes. That's water. Uh-oh. Where? Oh no." After the first "Uh-oh" I was rounding the corner and there was a river of water a foot wide flowing down the hallway toward the den and the bathroom floor was covered with water. The reason I don't have pictures is because I was too busy trying to find the mop bucket and wringer and yelling at Casey to go upstairs to get towels.

As we were finishing cleaning up the bathroom Joe came in the front door so I asked him to go downstairs and check my office. He did, and when he came back upstairs, he said, "Leave this, your office is a disaster."

Sigh.

Here are the towels we used to catch the water pouring through the ceiling:



Here is a very angry Flamingo Joe who is having to spend the weekend repairing the damage. Note the ginormous wet spots on the carpet:



Here is most of the contents of my office relocated to the "foyer":



Here is the water pouring out from underneath the wall where it had eventually found its way after ruining all the ceiling drywall in the front half of my office:

Where's my ceiling?

Oh right, here it is:



I'm sorry, I don't have a picture of the new client who showed up at 5:00 this afternoon. It's hard enough maintaining a professional atmosphere in your home office without the ceiling pouring toilet water on your clients, much less taking pictures of them while it's happening.