April can be awful

April, that cruellest month, is really doing a number on us this year. I'm so tired today that I'm not sure I'll be able to write a blog post, but I'll try. It's already 10:30 pm, so it'll be a short one.

So, the story begins last Tuesday night, when I was taking a shower before bed. I noticed that the water was pooling in the shower and the toilet was making ominous glug-glug sounds. When I finished my shower and got out of the tub, I noticed that the pooled water wasn't draining, not at all. And when I flushed the toilet, yeah, that didn't work either. 

When there's something wrong with our plumbing, it's always the same thing: tree roots. Rocket Boy's parents, new homeowners back in 1955, with no experience in the art of tree placement, decided to plant a lovely honey locust tree right on top of the sewer line (and the water line, because in those days, it was legal to put the two pipes in the same trench). It's a beautiful tree, probably the healthiest one we have. Wonder why? It spends the year feasting on our sewage.

I sent Rocket Boy a text before I went to bed: "Oh joy, bathtub won't drain. Will call plumber tomorrow."

But somehow I didn't call right away on Wednesday. I waited to see what would happen. The toilet flushed normally in the morning, so I thought I'd better do another test. I could have run the dishwasher, that would have been nice. But instead I decided to do the ultimate test: a load of laundry. And toward the end of the cycle, the water went everywhere. The toilet overflowed, the sewer line backed up into the bathtub (including a lot of poop), the laundry tub filled with dirty water, and water from somewhere went all over the concrete floor of the garage (where the washer lives).

So I called a plumber, the same one that came out last year, in January 2020. "You need to send the truck with the really long hose," I told the girl. She pencilled me in for the next day, between 12 and 2.

Wednesday night was interesting. No one could take a shower and we couldn't flush the toilet. We peed in it and I poured water from a bucket over the pee, just to dilute it (it wouldn't go down). I didn't make dinner -- I didn't want to eat anything, because then I'd have to "go." The twins followed my lead.

Thursday morning I had an appointment with a dermatologist for a skin check, due to my little squamous cell cancer three years ago. I apologized to her for being dirty -- of all the times to lose the ability to shower, right before a doctor looks at every inch of your body. She cut off a mole and a giant skin tag, and froze three actinic keratoses on my face. I thought that's what those spots were. I have to go back in a year. Guess it's necessary.

I went home to wait for the plumber. He arrived at 1 pm and I showed him the access to the sewer pipe in our basement. Then he started to work. Five and a half hours later, he asked for and received $725 from me and went home. During those five hours he removed large clumps of roots, got his coil stuck on something, called two other plumbers to help, finally got it unstuck, got more roots out, got it stuck again, got it unstuck, and gave up. "You need to get a camera down there, see what's going on," he told me. "It's possible a portion of the pipe has collapsed. We can do it, or you can get some other plumber to do it. But my supervisor told me not to go any further." I thanked him and he left.

After he left, I thought we probably had gained some time. There was still a clog, but it was further on down the line. Surely we could flush the toilet, take a shower, maybe even run the dishwasher. That night I took a quick shower. Immediately the toilet filled up again. Guess I was wrong.

While the plumber was working, it started to snow, and overnight we got about 6 inches. Pretty typical for April, heavy wet snow. At least the trees don't have leaves yet. And the twins had the day off from school on Friday, so I didn't have to run around getting them ready and scraping off my car.

I had an appointment to get my hair cut at 11:30 am, so I went ahead and did that (much of the snow had melted off the car by that point). I figured it would be easier to wash shorter hair quickly. I had asked Rocket Boy what to do, the night before, and he decided we would call a different plumber and have them put in a sewer tap (i.e., dig down to the pipe in the front lawn, as close to the clog as we can get). They did a sewer tap in the rental house last summer -- at the time I wondered, why the rental house and not our house? Now I really wondered. Two guys from the other plumber came to take a look at the situation, gave me a quote of $2700-2800, and said they could do it on Tuesday -- assuming it didn't snow again.

One small bright spot: I spent a lot of time this week helping Rocket Boy fill out his Financial Disclosure statement for work. This involved calling several organizations who don't send us statements anymore (because everyone's gone green, so it's all online, but we don't know our passwords or usernames, or how to get into the various sites, so it has effectively made our finances a mystery to us) to ask them how much money was in this or that account on 12/31/20. It turned out we have more money than we thought we did, especially since the stock market is so out of control. So if we end up having to fork out $20,000 instead of $2700 (and this is possible, if the pipe has collapsed), we'll be able to do that. Might even be a good idea to do that before the stock market falls again. Isn't that wonderful.

Also on Friday I started doing dishes, realizing that it would be a long time before I could run the dishwasher again. I set up two tubs in our double kitchen sink: one for warm soapy water and the other for rinse water. I couldn't put any of the water down the drain, so whenever one got full or dirty, I dumped it outside on the snow. It was slow work. Bit by bit I emptied the full dishwasher and also tackled the pile on the counter. But it's gotten bad again. Saturday night we had takeout from Chili's and now we have a million plastic takeout containers piled up. It's much harder to wash takeout containers (and milk bottles, juice bottles, etc.) because you can't rinse them out and pour the water down the sink. For each one I think I'll have to take it outside to dump the water, and every time I do that, little kitty Merlin tries to get out. Sigh.

Our next-door neighbor had seen the plumbers' trucks there all afternoon Thursday, and she texted me to ask if we needed to use her bathroom. So we started going over there. She gave me a key and let us go over when she wasn't there, for a little more privacy. I took a shower there on Friday, which was wonderful. I managed to get Teen B to take a shower there this morning, and I took another one tonight.

Today (Sunday) I decided it was time to find a laundromat. I was almost out of underwear and the kids would run out of everything in a couple of days. I went to the Table Mesa laundromat and found it to be very clean and spacious. I brought a book and sat in my car and read during the wash cycle. I didn't leave the clothes in the dryer long enough to get them completely dry, but after I got them home I realized that our DRYER is fine, it's just the washer I can't use. So next time, if I want to, I could just take the wet load home. 

I wonder if there will be a next time, or how many times there will be. The kids have enough clothes now to last through Friday. Will we have a cleared sewer line by then?

The toilet situation has been the most stressful. Twice, when poop wouldn't go down, I reached into the toilet with my hands and removed the soft wet turds, putting them into a plastic bag and then that bag into another bag, tying them up, and putting them in the garbage can, like dog poop in newspaper bags. The first time I did it with my bare hands, and then I bought a box of gloves at the pharmacy and used one of those (but it wasn't long enough and my arm got wet/dirty). Those two times might have been the worst experiences of this episode so far -- but a close competitor would be last night, when one of the twins had diarrhea and I couldn't scoop it out. I poured water on the mess, waited for it to slowly go down, poured more water, repeat, repeat. It just looked worse and worse.

This morning I woke up with one thought in my brain: plunger! Maybe I could plunge away the poop. Sure enough, it worked. I don't know what is going on in our sewer pipe, but plunging is helping keep the toilet clear enough to use a few times a day (only for poop; we leave pee to "mellow"). Can't do anything else with water, but that's the most important.

Oh, I'm forgetting another bad moment: Friday night, when I woke up nauseated and had to vomit into a toilet that wouldn't flush. Not getting a covid test this time. It's clearly stress related. I'm trying not to eat much in the evening, and nothing too fatty or weird. Of course, I only want to eat comfort food. Cookies, ice cream. What a great time to be a diabetic.

I'm noticing that I have to act like a mom more than usual during this hard time. Despite the fact that I am falling apart, I am the only resident of the house who knows what to do. I know how to wash dishes by hand, find and use laundromats, even remove poop from toilets. Today, when I took the boys over to the neighbor's to use the bathroom, our interactions reminded me of when they were much younger. I coaxed Teen B into the shower, washed his hair for him (normally he doesn't want me to see him naked). I convinced Teen A that it was really OK to use the toilet. I spoke in a soothing "Mom" voice. I have used that "Mom" voice more in the past few days than I have for the last couple of years. 

It is actually somewhat soothing to ME to use that "Mom" voice. It reminds me of when they were little boos, like two or three, and I was the all-knowing, all-doing mom. 

The cats are also helping, being very sweet to each other, even attempting to wash each other occasionally. They're not affected by this at all, since they use a litter box.

And Rocket Boy is on the other end of the phone line, offering advice and encouragement and sympathy. I wish he were here, but since he's not, I'm coping as best I can.

So now it's Sunday night. I have various things scheduled for this week, but I don't think I'll do my usual to-do list. Some stuff will get done, some won't. My book group meets Tuesday night, via Zoom, and on Wednesday I have a Zoom interview with someone at CU to discuss my experiences with undergraduate incivility and aggression. That'll be fun. Oh, and Friday is my second Covid shot. I sure hope I don't have a bad reaction, with all this going on.

Tomorrow, Monday, the kids are off school again, so we have reservations at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, including tickets to an IMAX film. I arranged this primarily because there are BATHROOMS with FUNCTIONING TOILETS at the museum. But now the weather is looking bad. It's going to rain and then snow. (I do not like to drive on highways in the snow.) And get this: the snow total for the day is predicted to be 1-2 inches, but overnight it's predicted to be 4-8 inches. So we could wake up Tuesday morning to 10 inches of snow on the ground. Regardless of whether the plumbers come, I will have to get the kids to school in that mess.

The plumbers are not going to come and put in a sewer tap if we have 10 inches of snow on the ground. And then we'll have to wait for it to melt, and for a few days the lawn will be a muddy wet mess. And once they can get in there, what if the pipe has collapsed? I don't know when we're going to have a clear sewer line again. I truly don't.

On that note, I will head for bed. We will survive, but it is not fun.