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?