Well the Christmas holidays are here again. I am pretty excited to have ten days off for the price of using three holiday days. I plan to rest, drink moderately, and spend a lot of time looking out the window, as non-essential travel is banned for our own good. Most of our traditions are out the window this year, but it was reassuring to see that I have accidentally continued one tradition we seem to have: small household disasters.
It started several years ago when we lived in our townhouse in Cloverdale. That year around December 22 our hot water tank died, so we had to scrape together several hundred dollars we didn’t have laying around for a new one. It could have been worse, as sometimes hot water tanks don’t just quit working but die in the hot water tank equivalent of a supernova, where they split open and flood the house. Ours just died peacefully in its sleep, but its timing made it Christmas disaster number one.
After we moved into our old house in Abbotsford we started having trouble with the water service line. Honestly, we had a lot of trouble with a lot of things, but only a couple of them got busy and wrecked Christmas. We had already dug up parts of the water line and made repairs to the old copper line, but it was Xmas day that it went with a flourish. A big wet spot had showed itself on the lawn – surely another leak had started in the line – and this time our daughters ran for shovels and dug it up. There they were in lovely dresses and makeup, digging up the muddy ground. We didn’t finish the repair that day, we had presents to open and a dinner to ravage, but that time I replaced the whole 40 feet of old copper from the road to the house when the weather warmed up.
The next catastrophe occurred a year or two later, and it began with a phone call I got at work around the 20th from our daughter Lizz. She told me water was coming out of the ceiling and running down the light fixture in her bedroom. It turned out that about 60 years of kitchen sludge had completely plugged a drain pipe which had came apart above her ceiling. For this adventure I had to remove about 20 feet of ceiling from the basement and cut out all the old drain pipe. The pipe was clogged like a fat man’s artery. There was a tiny little hole through which all of our dishwater had been seeping out, but it finally got too much. Christmas afternoon as guests were arriving for dinner, they were greeted by my two legs poking out from under the sink, trying to patch together a working drain.
The next year my half-ass plumbing skills came back to bite me. The drain I laid the year before wasn’t sloped properly, and the new pipe was already full of fatty surprises. Of course it chose December 24th to totally stop draining. Luckily Dorothy worked with a guy who was a plumber and who happened to live near by, so with one call I had expert help. All day Christmas he helped me install a whole new drain and, most importantly, slope it so there weren’t any low spots where the crap could build up. My helper even refused to be paid for his help! It was awful, but there certainly was a silver lining.
Another year or so later we decided to renovate the basement. (Of course, by “we” I mean Dorothy.) It didn’t start out as a holiday-tainting event, but it wound up that way. We scheduled in people to frame, drywall, do electrical and paint. Everything was going along well, then a flu came around and everyone got sick and cancelled days. The job got further and further behind. My Christmas that year was spent pulling down old drywall, feeling sick but having to carry on. I picked at my turkey dinner with drywall dust all over me and bits of plaster in my hair.
Fast forward to this year’s disaster. On the 21st I was drying some dishes when I came to a canister we had stored rice in. As I dried it, it started to slip. It had a heavy glass lid that fit snugly on top with a wire hinge. I fumbled the top for a second, then it fell. I stuck my foot out to break its fall and hopefully stop it from shattering, but the actual result of what I did could best be described as me giving it a robust drop kick into the front of our glass stove which smashed into about fifty million little glass cubes. The lid suffered no damage at all. You might me surprised at how much glass there is on the front of a glass stove. We swept up about five pounds of the carnage into a box for safe disposal. Then we picked out more glass, swept some more, vacuumed, swept again, moved things and repeated. Luckily the oven still works and the heavy inner glass door seems to insulate really well, so anyone with a poorly developed sense of danger who might touch the door with the oven on, probably wouldn’t get burned. I say luckily because that is where the turkey is going to get cooked in a day or two.
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We are hoping that’s the only disaster in store for us this year, but we missed a few years, so maybe we’re due for two? I am also hoping for a couple other things. One is, of the last three posts I written, only one of them got published on Bloglovin’, so I’m hoping this bucks the trend and gets put where people can see it. And most importantly, I hope anyone still reading this has a great Christmas, free of messes and chaos, and that everyone stays healthy and keeps enough sanity to get back to enjoying life when the opportunity comes.