Yesterday my dad and I decided to fix the fish lamp I brought back from Cairo.  He (the lamp, that is) needed a new plug and lightbulb socket.  We’d already tried to fix him once and it didn’t work, so yesterday morning we went back to the hardware store and got all the pieces we’d need.  When we got back home I went to do something on my computer.  Dad popped his head around the door and asked if I wanted to fix the lamp right then.  I said, “Sure!” and swung my legs around to stand up.  

Suddenly my socks were all wet.  I looked down.  There was a stream of water about six inches wide gently rippling its way across the floor.  What the…?

The miniature tidal wave turned out to be coming from the bathroom.  The whole bathroom was an inch deep in water which was leaking over the tile base of the walk-in shower, which was in turn coming up from the drain.  Eieuw. 

I started yelling for help and my mom and dad came in.  After some hasty moving of my stuff to higher ground (on top of the bed, mostly), we raced around and discovered that the drain in the bathtub in the other room was also backing up.  Dad did a little test to try to determine what was happening.  Basically this involved shoving a hose down the drainpipe from the washing machine, turning it on and seeing if this caused the flood to get worse.

It did.

Apparently this meant that the drain was backed up, a fact that I thought we’d already determined by the fact that the bathtub and the shower were full of water with little floating pieces of lint in it.

At this point a notion struck my parents and I: why is it that in the past three months I’ve been involved in three floods?!  My parents are thinking about taking out extra home insurance.

After several hours with a wet-dry vac when the flood started running out my bedroom door, the landlord coming over and not doing anything terribly useful, and finally the city Public Works department arriving with a big truck and poking around with a long tube down the house’s drain, everything was fixed and the waters subsided.  Dad and I even managed to get the fish lamp all tricked out while we were waiting.  Now my room is dry and I have a lamp in the shape of a fish that actually works!  Honestly, who could ask for more?

I am concerned about the amount of flooding that has been happening in my life in recent months, however.  I must say that I’ve never been involved in a flood until that first one in the houseboat bathroom (and I’d like to remind everyone that it started BEFORE I got there.)  Now I’ve had three – three! – floods since the end of September and I’m really starting to wonder if I should start sleeping in a life vest just in case.  I actually thought that maybe all these wacky hijinks would stop once I left Cairo and my life could return to the peaceful, sedate track it had been observing up to that point.  Now that the flooding has followed me all the way back to Florida, I’m starting to have some serious doubts.