The second installment on recent events in my life (yesterday’s posting “The passing domestic scene: biopsies”, covering 10/2 to the present, was the first).
Today’s story begins on the morning of 10/7. I was intently focused on a cute posting about a Bizarro cartoon — “The flannel frontier”, finally posted on 10/9 — when I became peripherally conscious of the sound of running water. Really loud running water. Had I left a faucet running?
I looked up from my keyboard, to witness waterfalls streaming from the ceiling in four places, drenching everything below them, pooling on the carpeting in the living room and surging in a wave into the little hallway to the bathroom.
Six hours in October. Desperate e-mails and phone calls went out to the condo management and my daughter Elizabeth. Which then radiated to an upstairs neighbor, VK (at work), who lives not above my workroom, living room, and kitchen, but to the south, above my study, bathroom, and bedroom. This was a hugely fortuitous error, because VK had been having construction work done on his condo, and literally had a contractor on call. His enormously helpful contractor soon appeared, bearing buckets to put under the waterfalls and yards and yards of plastic sheeting to cover the furniture and the rug.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth deputized my grand-child Opal Armstrong Zwicky to aid in disaster relief (Opal’s partner Emy Vila-Kubiak was at work and unavailable for lending a hand); Opal came with a shopvac, for sucking up water from the floor and carpet. We are an odd family, but resourceful.
Eventually the condo manager got hold of the neighbor above my living room, BW. who was of course also at work and utterly unaware of what had been happening at his place: a bathroom sink backing up somehow, flooding the bathroom, leaking through into the flooring, and spreading in my ceiling, to pour through cracks in the plastering and, especially, through all the fire sprinklers — including one that’s just two feet from my desk chair, but over a patch of carpeting, not any furniture; it was the furthest from BW’s bathroom and so its waterfall was the last to leak into my house, and then the last to finish falling from the ceiling into its bucket (12 hours after the deluge began).
Soon VK himself appeared — I never did see BW, I think he was on call at Stanford Hospital (he’s a cardiologist) — and earned some sort of Good Neighbor Award, by genially supervising the cleanup for several hours and keeping me company. We opened all the windows and doors we could, to air things out.
At 2, when things were sort of in hand but the living room was still under plastic, my housecleaner Viv Ochoa appeared for her weekly visit; she managed to competently care for the southern half of the condo and the kitchen (which was also unaffected). Everybody learned to pick their way over the plastic sheeting. I even learned how to do it in little jumps with my walker, so that I was able to get myself some lunch in the midst of the chaos. Eventually VK and I gathered up the plastic for his contractor to dispose of, and then we could survey the damage.
Nothing important was harmed. This is, frankly, astounding. I thought of it as a surprising silver lining, just dumb luck. VK thought of it as magically dodging a lot of bullets (he’s had the experience of fleeing his native country for refuge in America). We then exchanged some passionate opinions about the importance of neighborliness. (In an odd moment, I filled out my mail ballot for our special elections. And ordered in some exceptionally easy-to-eat food for dinner.)
Work clothes. When all this started, I was at my worktable, in my customary work clothes: underpants and a tank top. I seem to have just gone on that way, while streams of people marched in and out of the house for six hours. I have in fact lost almost all sense of modesty, though I am good at keeping my privates private (I have to whizz every 20 or 30 minutes and have learned how to use one of the many urinals distributed throughout the house without exposing myself). I had entirely forgotten that I was wearing this tank top:
Nobody commented, or even seemed to notice. Well, it’s an understated FAGGOT shirt.
The aftermath. Eventually the focus of home care shifted to the wet carpeting. As it happens, the heating in my condo is radiant heating from electric coils embedded in the concrete flooring, so the major part of drying out the carpeting could be achieved just by turning up the thermostat, to heat the floor. This worked beautifully.
Then we discovered — modified rapture — that there was a significant area without subfloor coils. So Elizabeth ordered up a portable dehumidifier to put to work on this spot. It took some time for the machine to arrive; Opal installed it yesterday, and it’s quietly humming away at extracting water from the air. We hope its work will be done by, oh, Monday.
Meanwhile, no mildewy smell, so we think we’ve got this one licked.
October 18, 2025 at 10:41 am |
Wow, every lower floor tenant’s worst nightmare! I’d be helpless; but glad that you had adequate luck and assistance.