House arrest
It all started with the bubbles. On our way out early one Saturday morning, I noticed that there were big bubbles coming up in the toilet in the powder room downstairs. (Sort of like what happens in the office water cooler...complete with "bloop...bloop" noises.) I called my husband over and said, "Honey? There are bubbles in the toilet." He said, "Try to flush it." I did, and it promptly backed up (but didn't overflow.) This, sadly, is a relatively common occurrence in my house so my husband followed the standard clogged toilet procedure which involves a plunger and a lot of splashing. It didn't work. (I should have known something was wrong because how does a toilet nobody uses get clogged?) We turned off the water to the toilet, just in case, and went out. (Duhhh.) About five hours later I returned home to find a sea of sewage on the floor. The toilet had overflowed rather vigorously, spilling raw sewage onto the wood floor in the bathroom which was quickly making its way into the hallway. It continued to overflow while I stood there watching. Turns out a sewer pipe had collapsed, and all the waste from every other unit in the building had backed up into my house. Ten hours and one three-ton backhoe later the pipe had been dug up and fixed...leaving us with a giant pile of dirt in the yard, ripped-up landscaping, and a house that felt a little...well...unclean.
Then there was the beeping. A few days later, a smoke alarm began beeping a little beep reminder, about once every minute, saying, "Excuse me...um...excuse me...I think my battery's running down...excuse me..?" I walked around the house, from one room to another, from one floor to another, listening hard at each smoke detector with my head cocked to one side, to determine which was the beeping one. I found it downstairs in the basement, and called my husband to replace the battery. He replaced it, and I went back to what I was doing. But the beeping didn't stop. This time it was coming from upstairs. I went upstairs and stood under the smoke alarm in the bedroom and waited...then the sound came in stereo. Both smoke alarms on the same floor had simultaneously run out of batteries, plus the one in the basement...could that be possible? I mean, even if they were all changed on the same day at roughly the same time with batteries from the same package...how could they possibly all go dead within minutes of each other on the same day?
Then it was the lightbulbs. I flipped the switch in the hallway on my way upstairs and the lightbulb in the ceiling fixture blew with a small "pop". Then, later that same night, I flipped the switch for the hallway light near the pantry, and -- pop! -- there went that lightbulb, too. Then I went downstairs to the basement, and the light in the corner was doing the dim-bright-dim thing bulbs do when they're about to die. My husband dutifully got out the stepladder and went around changing lightbulbs en masse.
Then it was the ants. A plague of ants, really. I came upstairs into the kitchen for a snack and noticed the floor was moving. There were hundreds of ants milling around aimlessly on the kitchen floor. I swept them up, sent them to a watery grave (read: flushed 'em) and waited to see where they were coming from. They were oozing out in alarming numbers from under the molding in one area of the kitchen. I did the only thing I could think of to stop the invasion -- I stuffed a piece of paper towel into the tiny little crack they were coming out of. Believe it or not, this worked -- for two days. Then all hell broke loose. They appeared in one place, then another, every time we turned around there were ants in the kitchen. The poor dog scooted his little bed all around the room to get away from them. We decided, after much debate, to spray -- carefully. We sprayed where we saw them coming in, only to have them reappear minutes later somewhere else. Then they started showing up in other areas of the house. It was starting to feel rather like a Hitchcock movie until finally my mother called and I mentioned the ant problem (as I walked around the kitchen, phone in hand, stepping on them.) She said, "Oh, yeah, ants. It's the weather. Get those ant traps and put them outside and that'll get rid of them right away." I bought six traps for a total of $2.65 and we put them outside, near the foundation of the house. (The idea was that the "worker ants" take the bait back to their colony and share it with the rest of the ants who promptly die. Frankly, I felt kinda guilty about committing ant genocide but they were no longer welcome in my home...so it was their time to die.) Five minutes later there were swarms of ants boiling over the traps. The next day the ants were gone. We haven't seen one since.
As my husband put it, "There sure is a lot to do when you have a house!" I can't help wondering what's next.
8:43:28 PM 
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