Happy New Year Indeed!

New Years Eve was a blast. I mean it.

Several days prior to the 31st my toilet began bubbling. Bubbling as if there was a person in the drain releasing air so that it popped through the surface of the water. If you happened to be sitting on the toilet when a large air bubble was released, you'd get heartily sprayed. My landlords and I were stumped. They, in fact, were quite disbelieving until the toilet started making its "bloop bloop" noises the afternoon of the 31st and I dragged them in to take a look. We weren't sure what to do with it on new year's eve and so they opted to look into it immediately after the weekend.

Ah, hindsight.

New Year's Eve was a big party at the little house in Miami Springs. Latin music was vibrating through the walls and floors, people were screaming and laughing, I was being a total misanthrope and talking to my fiance in my bedroom. At one point shortly after midnight I see the door to my bathroom rattling and hear some strange creaking noises coming from underneath the house. My cat is going crazy.

Standing up revealed water throughout my bedroom floor and all of the drains in my bathroom erupting with water, clogged, yellowed, sandy, flowing unending from the shower drain and filling up the shallow area, spilling over into my room. I slosh around cursing wildly, picking my shoes up off the ground, cords, bags, anything I'd dropped on the floor, then running out to tell my landlord that there was a HUGE problem

He already knew.

The exact same thing happened to their bathroom and so we were all (60 or so of us) left without plumbing in the first hours of new year's day. One witty guest informed us that this was very good luck because we really had no place to go but up for the rest of 2006. I just wanted to crawl into a hole. I was exhausted, pissed off and wishing that I could be anywhere but in that sopping wet house. My landlord eventually drove me to a Holiday Inn Express to pass the night with working plumbing.

So it seems, we find out the next day, that the city was at fault. They've been doing work on the storm sewers on our street (as I've mentioned before) and these yahoos can't put together a pipe system correctly and so backed up all of the major pipes in the area immediately surrounding our house. It's fixed now, but I'm still beside myself. Beside myself that the idiots working on this huge project care more about getting their Cuban cigars wet than they do about actually fixing the problem. Beside myself that my new years was completely truncated by an exploding toilet and shower, and beside myself because my landlord called the city's emergency line over and over and nobody ever picked up the phone (Hello!! Emergencies NEVER happen when it's convenient..)

The good thing is that this story will most likely turn into one of those anecdotes that get a big laugh every time it is regaled. I look forward to that. Right now I'm still mopping up the mess.