Currently in bed being snuggled by my dog while waiting for a plumber.

So. That’s a fun thing at 10:45.

Big picture, it’s fine.

Hoping his snake found what it needed to.

The plumber went home wet and sad. But my basement is slightly less wet. Tomorrow, we ride again!

A wet and sad plumber at 1:30am sure is a thing. Meanwhile I was starting to shiver from fatigue and keeping our basement cool.

Dragging so hard this morning but I have my hands on a shop vac and I am at Lowe’s to get some hazmat cleanup supplies. Most of the basement is fine. Part of the wet part is fine. Something bad happened in the basement shower and it’s terrifying and I am so sad.

Our main drain is 95% or more blocked.

Basically we have an ancient cast iron pipe system outside our house (partly inside, some is newer). I’d run across this on TikTok if all places, but it becomes very jagged inside and can catch things over time. Ours has a block about 20 feet out from the house.

Unfortunately the guy needs to put in the breaker tool via the outdoor trap (reasons involving design of our pipe system) and it is … cast iron and won’t open. He’ll be back @ noon with a plan.

Last night a simultaneous shower and laundry did the trick on backing up the house drain. It could be SO much worse. In comparative terms we are fine and we will be ok.

But whatever came up in the basement shower is not ok, I am so sad about the floor in there. I bought heavy duty cleaning supplies and borrowed a shop vac to get all the random water puddles we have left.

Per the plumbing dispatcher, the poor guy who was out last night is also dragging. M has to work so here we are.

It’s a really gorgeous day so I’m glad at least driving to get the borrowed shop vac and cleaning stuff meant I got to see the sky and wind.

Also we are lucky in that we can use all the water we want as long as it doesn’t go down the drain. Washing up our faces and bodies in bowls and tossing the water outside is fine!

It is the kind of autumn day I live for. Wow. I’m gonna remember to take outdoor breaks

Me: oh no I won’t be able to go to the gym tonight

Also me: single-handedly clears a bunch of stuff including some very heavy things out of the basement

I mean this is WHY we gym

The plumbers are back, more plumber, more snake, send good vibes!

M had to take Blue out for plumber reasons and he not only got me the chicken sandwich I asked for, he got me mozz sticks!!!

I had some food but I did not realize how hungry I was from all the physical and emotional energy

THEY GOT IT! And they've been running the hose out through it to the street for a while to be sure it's truly running free and used that time to shop vac some of the water for me since they had to babysit it. I nearly started crying.

I still have a lot of cleaning to do but 😭

Also after last night’s bill which included overtime, I was prepared for this to run us quite a lot but they treated it as the same service call so only a fee for 1.5 hours of work. Blew me away

A fun thing to do before sitting down to a hot dinner was read the chicken recall. Luckily this was not in it (it wasn’t even a simplistic project to the recall, it turned out).

The entire basement is dry. The horrible scuzzy stuff that came out of the basement shower drain is handled. The shower is washed and bleached.

NOW to clean the three rubber mats properly, THEN sweep the dry floor, THEN mop with a bleach solution

It was only gray water but it did carry scuzz.

We are so fucking lucky that almost everything the water touched was a) a rubber mat, b) something left behind in a back corner by the last owner that I’d meant to throw out, or c) two cloth mats we are tossing. I had to shift a ton of stuff but none of it was actually touched, I just needed access to the area or it sat atop the rubber mats.

I got to bed at 2am and took forever to fall asleep so I am running on adrenaline and also a lot of good food.

Much like a British tourist I have significantly underestimated the number of clean mop buckets I need because it gets dirty so quickly

been clean and collapsed on the couch for a while now.

I still had lots of shop vac work left to do, but I remain so grateful that the plumbers used the time while they ran the hose through it to run the shop vac and lessen the work I had to do by about 20 minutes. It was a very long day and that was something!

and ow my back

it was yea only 24 hours ago that a much happier Ruth was heading downstairs to put her last load of laundry in the dryer before going to bed. she thought.

Good morning.

(I’m so tired, every muscle hurts, but I have hot coffee and a bathrobe and a blanket and quilt)

Later this morning, I need to safely disconnect the gas stove because we have a whole OTHER thing going on this week 😭 my body is screaming.

I am going to call now and schedule a massage.

plumbing update 😭 welp, the pipe really is fucked. but luckily we know the early signs of a backup/flood now and I have called one person to fix it and three for estimates.

Four.

Ok, we can do this.

Me talking to one of the guys: oohhhh yeah, today might work but maybe we could do next week because it's actually a problem right now and we're going to have a different company out here snaking it.

😬

is a 2 contractors a crowd?

fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

One hour again with still no joy, they moved the snake. It’s kind of an inversion of last time. Blue is cooped up with Micah and so upset on the rare occasions they have to pass through. I’m glad this isn’t happening at 1am this time and hopefully they’ll get it to truly move/break up enough to get us through to getting it replaced

I’m exhausted and I haven’t even done anything.

/flops sideways on the couch

what I cannot tell in this moment is whether they're leaving or ???

welp, the only good(?) thing about the whole thing is that he says he's going to tell his boss not to charge us because the person in October should've run a camera.

He worked over 2 hours through a snow squall (though the squall bit happened while he was in the basement). With another guy for most of it.

And in the end, no joy. He thinks it's broken about 2 feet outside.

So we are on "do as little with water as possible" watch. We still have water in.

Looked into crying emoji options and there are decent ones but not the one I was looking for