Raindrops keep falling on my head...

My condo tried to turn into Niagara Falls last week.

Emphasis on tried. It (thankfully) did not succeed. I awoke Thursday morning to a drip, drip, drip onto my kitchen floor. Polite of it to wait until my work-from-home days, if you ask me. Anyway, there was a drip. The first thing one does when there is a drip is figure out where the drip is coming from. Off we go upstairs to find out if my upstairs neighbor has experienced a flood of any magnitude recently. She had not. Okay, next option--pipes. But whose? Yeah, that was a problem. You see, it's a bit difficult to tell where the pipes are, and to whom they belong, and, you know, all those other things that are tricky to accomplish without x-ray vision. We mere mortals have to punch holes in the walls in order to ascertain from whence the drip derives.

Oh, and for that you need a plumber. And I didn't have one in the Rolodex.

Cue many, many phone calls and texts to all the people I did have in the Rolodex, like my contractor, and my uncle who owns properties and has extensive experience in fixing them. My uncle didn't have a plumber up his sleeve. My contractor had his roof & ceiling guy, so I called him. He came out on his way to another job, bless him, and said that nine times out of ten it's a pinhole in the hot water line. We shut the hot water off at the tank and he went on his way.

My upstairs neighbor, through all of this, was having a Grade-A conniption--she is most definitely a worrier. I, on the other hand, was a paragon of calm.

Look, someone had to be.

We did finally manage to get hold of a plumber my upstairs neighbor had used a few years ago, but his mother had just been taken to the hospital with cardiac distress. Timing, amirite? He promised to call me the next morning, once we established that I wasn't in any imminent danger of floating away. I managed to get my contractor to be on standby in case the plumber wasn't able to make it out. The hot water stayed turned off at the tank except for about half an hour after my evening dance classes when a shower was non-negotiable, and for the most part, everything was fine. And for what wasn't, there was a bucket.

Friday morning rolled around. My neighbor was still in a tizzy. The plumber was going to stop by after noon.

He got to me at five in the evening.

Not entirely his fault--his noon job had been late to him, and threw the whole schedule off. Anyway, come he did, and cut a hole in my ceiling, and confirmed that 1) the pipe was mine (to the infinite delight of my upstairs neighbor), 2) it was in fact a small hole in the hot water line, and 3) it was an easy fix. Or, at least, it would have been, had the valve for opening and closing the hot water line at the tank not chosen that exact moment to fail.

Oh, what joy. My building is an old building, and that means that there aren't water shut-off valves for individual units--when there's pipes to be repaired, the whole building has to be shut off. Shutting off the water to an entire building requires 24 hours' notice--and in this case getting approval to work from home the following Monday so that the work could be done. Oh, what rapture. No hot water, and a family party the next day. (We can talk about the party next week.) Thankfully, my parents were in a hotel in Danville so I could mooch their shower before the shindig, but after that I was S.O.L. on the hot water front. It wasn't a terribly pleasant weekend, all things told.

Monday finally rolled around, and the plumber was right on time, and after a couple of hours I had hot water back. Hooray!

Still have a hole in my ceiling, though. It's going to stay that way for a week or so to make sure the leak is properly patched up, and then I get to fight tooth and claw for a spot in my contractor's schedule. He's a popular dude for good reason!

That was far more adulting than I really wanted to do. Ain't it always?

It's not *really* my party, but I'm still probably going to cry. Of frustration. Or boredom. Possibly both.

Oh, goody. Oh, yes. Why not? Let's have a family reunion.

Please kill me now. Please.

This coming Saturday, there is going to be a party. A party full of relations with whom I am not particularly familiar. It's the Fazzio side--the Italian side--but more than that, it's all the cousins who are approximately the same vintage as my father. People I have possibly seen at assorted funerals over the years, or maybe at another function similar to the one we're about to have, but if you asked me to pick them out of a lineup, I'd be screwed.

Suffice it to say I'm not really looking forward to it. This is my father's rodeo, which means I've been conscripted into making parts of it happen. Centerpieces. Party favors. You know, little arty things. I'm probably going to get saddled with picking up the food as well, because the restaurant catering the affair doesn't deliver. My salad bowl is being commandeered to hold flatware roll-ups. My bocce set is being commandeered for the party activity. I've realized that putting my name on things I'm taking along to help with setup and take-down and serving and whatnot would be pointless because it is literally everyone's name, so I'm going to have to resort to stickers or something. I dropped $200 at the schmancy olive oil store in Lafayette last Saturday on imported olives (which were the object of the trip in the first place) and little cutesy two-packs of curated olive oil and flavored vinegar pairings in baggies with raffia ribbons, because they were there and seemed like a good idea. Well, they seemed like a good idea, so I called Dad. Dad didn't answer. He got me when I was halfway home. Being the delightfully tractable child I am, I turned my sorry ass around and went back and picked them up.

I know I'm going to get stuck doing tech support at some point. We're running a three hour playlist of Italian music and a couple of family videos off my mom's laptop, which is temperamental at best. I must remember to pack my HDMI cable...

If I'm lucky, I'll get to hide behind organizational tasks all day. If I'm not lucky, I'll resort to hiding under a table. I'm not proud. The most likely outcome is that my mother and I will hide in some corner together for the duration of the festivities, when we aren't hiding behind giant trays of pasta or something similar. And the odds of me getting to skive off early are slim to none. Such is life.

Pray for me, kids. I'll do my best, but it ain't gonna be pretty.

It's all a bit floaty...

We processed about 500 payrolls today (Wednesday 10/13) and I don't think I have any more synapses to devote to coherent thought. Perhaps I'll try being incoherent instead.

There is a squirrel in the courtyard who has a lot to say. He, she, or indeed it, has been clucking on and off all evening. It's a strange noise. Sort of a combination of angry Elmer Fudd and Donald Duck, only it comes out of a small mammal. A small mammal that likes to throw acorns at your head when you pass under its tree. Which is rude. I'm neighbors with a rude squirrel.

I've already done the majority of my Christmas shopping. Packages are starting to arrive. My neighbor (not the squirrel, a human neighbor,) has already gotten one of my parcels. Luckily he's a decent sort and left me a note so I knew where to collect it.

Are they letting you do your own frozen yogurt yet? I haven't had frozen yogurt since all this nonsense started. If they're still not letting you do it yourself, though, I think I'll wait a while longer. No one ever gets the ratios right. It's both an art and a science, concocting your own frozen yogurt creation, and everyone has their system that the kid behind the counter who clearly doesn't want to be there will never adhere to, which leads to sub-par frozen yogurt, and who the heck has time for that? Not I, thank you very much.

We're in that weird time of year around here when the weather seems to be having an identity crisis. You never know from day to day whether you're going to need to bundle up or strip off, or possibly both. It leaves one wondering when they'll be able to officially pack up the summer wardrobe and break out the sweaters.

I'm eating ice cream for dinner. What? I'm an adult. I do what I want.

Speaking of me being an adult, I can now officially shuffle off my mortal coil with considerably less paperwork. Well, perhaps not considerably less. A bit less. Let's call it more streamlined paperwork. That's better. Yes, I have formalized my estate and put things into trust and signed off on advanced healthcare directives and dictated to whom my worldly possessions should be endowed upon my grim demise by way of being violently squished by a large bus. Necessary? Yes. Kind of worrying? Yes. Expensive? Oh, HELL yes. But it's done, and that makes one less thing to worry about.

I actually do feel better now that it's all sorted out.

The gallery is open

 I wasn't feeling terribly wordy this week. Instead, I messed around with some of the (admittedly excessive) art supplies I have lying around cluttering the place up. And you get to see the results!

 

The honeycomb bits came off the box from a fancy face mask. The whole piece makes me think of Eddie Izzard's bit about, "You're covered in bees!" I love Miss Eddie. Here, have a video link: BEES!

This one I salvaged from the box that some of my paintbrushes came in. I thought it was awfully fancy for something that was going to end up in the recycling, so I recycled it in a way that it could be appreciated. I might do a bit more with this one when the ink sprays are properly dry...