Butter Side Down

My buddy Kris tagged me this morning with a meme. So, since I’m SUCH a team player, here goes:

The rules:

1. Post the rules of the game at the beginning.

Check.

2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.

Um, with questions that all ask “what are your…” or “what are you…,” just who else precisely would the questions be for? Perhaps there might be some confusion if I owned a pair of goldfish I’ve named “You” and “Your,” but otherwise, isn’t this rule covering something a trifle… well… obvious?

3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.

I can see a slight process problem, as Kris (who tagged me) has already tagged everyone I would tag. We’ll just skip this rule.

4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

Check. I’ll go do that in just a moment.

On to the questions!

What were you doing five years ago?

You have GOT to be kidding - five years ago? Like I keep track of what I ate for breakfast today, much less what I was doing 1825 days ago? I think not. Humph. Next question.

What are five things on your to-do list for today?

Hm. Another tricky question. Maybe create a “to-do” list? Nah. Why do that, when I can use my trusty ‘projects and tasks’ spreadsheet? It even lets me enter weighted priorities to figure out what needs getting done first and tells me if it’s even possible to finish something in the available time. Note: having a spouse who is a spreadsheet programming wizard can have unexpected benefits, including nifty spreadsheets that explode when you say you have one minute available but need 10,000 hours for your backlog of household- related critical priority tasks. Undermining software can be so entertaining!

What are five snacks you enjoy?

Shortbread cookies - my own recipe. Cheesecake - my own recipe. Parfaits - my own recipe. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) Fresh sliced strawberries and bananas smothered in Sibbey’s vanilla ice cream. Anything made with tart cherries and lots of sugar. I do not enjoy celery, skimmed milk, raw broccoli or any other tasteless substitute for real food. So there.

What are five things you would do if you were a billionaire?

Probably what I’m dong right now, except with money.

What are five of your bad habits?

Bad hobbits? Are there bad hobbits? I thought they were all nice, like Frodo and Sam and besides, I don’t own any hobbits - wouldn’t that be slavery? What? Oh. Bad habits. Now I’m even more confused. I don’t wear a habit! Only nuns and sisters wear habits! I wear ordinary street clothing… Have the rules changed? Am I supposed to be wearing a habit? And why would I want a “bad” habit? What’s that? Oh. Can you repeat the question?

What are five places where you have lived?

In my imagination. Nice place, most of the time. Oops. Sorry. You meant physical locations. Lemme see… suburb of Detroit… Big 10 University city. Big 10 University suburb. Different Big 10 University city. Yet another Big 10 University suburb. Small village in Wisconsin.

What are five jobs you’ve had?

Paying or unpaid? Volunteer? Mandatory? First job I had was dusting and mopping my room. The pay was lousy (not suprising, as it was unpaid forced labor - parents can be so darn mean). Hated it. Still do. That’s why if you come into my house and complain about dust bunnies you’ll be given a choice between dusting and mopping yourself, or taking the top sheet from a pad of post-it notes, writing an appropriate dust-bunny-type name on the top sheet (e.g. “Fang”), and tagging the nearest critter. After all, if it’s a pet, then it belongs, right? Of course right. Perfectly logical.

Then there was my second job, which entailed ironing my Dad’s handkerchiefs so they were precisely square and perfect and fit all military specs. Then there was –

Oh, quit grimacing! I’ll stop now!

Memes. Humph.

We had a little ‘incident’ here last Thursday.

Our village public works department decided to ‘water jet’ the sanitary sewers for preventative maintenance. Basically, the task involves using a truck to pump water at very high pressures through a municipality’s sewage systems, to prevent blockages from developing in the sanitary sewers.

If you, Oh Best Beloved, haven’t ever heard of water jetting, I have one piece of advice:

Be afraid. Be very afraid if your municipality decides to buy this type of equipment.

Visualize this scene:

Michael and I were in our kitchen, enjoying a late lunch when we heard a gurgle coming from our pipes… a distinctive gurgle… the gurgle that says our normally sane municipality has hauled out the “water jetting” equipment and failed to contact us, as they had promised, after we had problems LAST time they water jetted.

See our horrified expressions? No? Well, trust me. We had horrified expressions, the type of expression Indiana Jones has when he drops into a snake pit.

Now, visualize Michael as he ran frantically down the hallway to our bathroom, because from past experiences we know that:

Satan has taken possession of our toilet.

Yep. We needed a toilet exorcist, because water was shooting straight up, in a demonic swirling geyser - and it wasn’t clean tap water.

Being an intrepid soul, Michel did what I did last time our village helpfully jetted the sewers: slammed the lid on the toilet.

So, we had Michael holding down the toilet lid, with water (laced with you-know-what) boiling out around the edges of the toilet seat.

*AAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!*

As I frantically dialed the village’s public works department to tell them to shut the freakin’ equipment off, Michael lunged across the bathroom (leaving one hand holding down the toilet lid), grabbed a toilet plunger we own, whipped up the toilet seat and slammed the plunger into the toilet, blocking the outlet-turned-inlet.

Result: Michael, feet braced, leaning with considerable force into the toilet, became the living plug in the sewage dike. The sewage, not to be thwarted, blew the drain cover up in the bathtub and spewed all over inside the tub.

At least I got through to the work crew and got them to turn the equipment off well before the bathtub overflowed…

Oh, yeah, this was just SO what we needed in our lives.

*Sigh.*

The village says that they’ll try to remember to call us when they do this again (Again? AGAIN?!) in two years and use ‘lower’ power in our section of the village.

Right.

Like that’s happened the last three times they did this — with the same results in not only our house but other homes.

We spent the afternoon and a large part of the evening cleaning then disinfecting our entire bathroom.

Talk about sh– happens…