Writing Report June 30, 2018
Blockage.
No, not writer’s block, but blockage in the medical sense and the plumbing sense.
Specifically, blockage in my older daughter and blockage in my bathtubs.
Earlier this month my wife left on a vacation trip with her cousins, I settled in for a long spell of writing -- well, why bore you; here’s the original post.
Cockeyed optimists that we are, I and the rest of the family presumed our daughter’s medical problems were over.
Ha!
Another painful bout sent our daughter back to the emergency room, only this time UCLA did manage to shift her to another hospital, and while they thankfully were able to solve the problem without additional surgery or invasive procedures, it wasn’t a fun week.
Needless to say, I got no writing done.
After she was released from the hospital, she and her husband and son decided to spend the weekend together (the little boy suffered terrible separation anxiety while she was in the hospital the second time) and once again I thought I’d have some quiet time -- at least a weekend -- to get caught up.
Somewhere God and Al Swearengen are high fiving each other.
We noticed a drain problem with our two tubs on Thursday and by Friday it had become quite problematic.
We tried cleaning out the pipes with weasels and snakes (the kind you find in hardware stores, although we had an encounter with a mouse that weekend that also dragged things out…), but all to no avail.
After wasting an entire weekend, we called a drain specialist on Monday.
(We called two, actually, but the first turned out to be kinda flakey so we cancelled and went with the second.)
He arrived on Monday afternoon, very courteous / competent / professional.
And despite hours of effort, he couldn’t get the drains open.
(We’ve since learned that the original builders used the least expensive method of linking the two tub drains together, which means when one clogs the other clogs but they’ve clogged in such a way as to make it impossible for the snake handler -- i.e., drain specialist -- to reach.)
So now we’re waiting for the condominium’s maintenance expert / trouble shooter to come and tell us what we already know, and then we’re going to have to find a drain expert who can access the drains by going through the air vents in the attic (don’t ask), and finally unclog our tubs.
In the meantime, I go to the gym to shower and Soon-ok showers after her yoga class.
Luckily the sinks and toilets aren’t affected or we’d really have an emergency on our hands.
All this is a really long winded (long fingered?) way of saying I haven’t gotten any writing done.
© Buzz Dixon
