Current location:	next to a fan and a window
Current mood:	nauseated

oh crap!
So, now that I'm over having a bad day (turns out the other day when my cognition was bad?  I didn't realize I was running a fever...d'oh!) internally, I get hit with the externals.

Or maybe it's house innards.

Anyway, our sewer is backed up into our basement.  Since the basement is finished, this includes Joseph's room and the magic workshop (yes, I really do love that living with a magician means saying I have a magic workshop in my house).

So yesterday, we blocked off the flood, opened all the windows, and fled for a good part of the afternoon.  The good thing?  Finally went into the Somerville Library and got new cards, which I wasn't able to find after we moved -- a year ago APRIL.  Turns out that Joseph and I together owed a grand total of $0.30, which was pleasant, since I remembered he had overdue fines.

But this morning, without calling as they'd been asked to do, the crew with plumber and hazmat cleanup appeared at the house at 8am.  The plumber was just *RUDE*, telling me "well, we didn't" when I asked why he hadn't called, and then telling me we needed to open the utility door (which doesn't go into the basement) and then treating it like everything about the situation was my  fault -- the back up, the  fact that we have (*gasp*) stuff in the basement, the fact that we hadn't cleared everything out of the downstairs bathroom and thrown it out (isn't that why you hire clean-up people?  So you don't have to wade through 3-4" of raw sewage yourself?), that the back stairs are narrow....

"I didn't really wanna take this job lady," he said.

So I mobilize Fish and Joseph to move everything in the basement and magic room to one side or into the parts of Joseph's room out of the window-to-door line that the sewer rooter hose will have to go through.  And as we're moving the last object, the reluctant plumber knocks on the door.  They're leaving because their estimate needs to go up because they think they need to tear out the wall between Joseph's room and the bathroom, and they couldn't get the landlord on the phone.

I come upstairs, and send email to landlord and upstairs neighbor (who for those who know him is Mycroft, no doubt his own cheery self about the whole thing) saying, "don't flush, cook, shower, wash hands, or do anything that puts water down the drains until this is fixed, please -- they just left but nothing is fixed"

Then almost immediately, I have *no* problem reaching the landlord, who calls them, and finds out about the upped estimate.

Now, the whole backing up the sewer thing may be because someone flushed paper towels down a toilet.  There were paper towels floating back up at any rate.  The clog is between our unit and the street.  Since the estimate went up, we will be doing CSI: Sewer Backup to figure who flushed the towels.

Neither Fish nor I had been in the bathroom.  Joseph says he wasn't, and he never had issues flushing paper towels when he was 6 -- don't know why he'd start now.  Jonathan says he didn't flush any such things.  That leaves the ever cheerful Mycroft (who, I think, has more sense) or the guys who were replastering Mycroft's bathroom last week.

Hope the plaster guys don't use costco paper towels...;)

I'm not really all that repulsed by stuff that I might have cleaned out of a diaper, although I don't like having it all over my floor.  On the other hand, there are chemicals and god knows what in this stuff, and every hour it's in the house, mold is growing somewhere.  And add to this that everything involving food or hygiene is pretty much on hold -- and well...to paraphrase Han Solo, "what an amazing smell we've discovered!"

*sigh*