Friday night I arrived home from work to a pot of delicious-smelling Bolognese sauce bubbling on the stove. S. had been home all day with Leith and they had decided to make me dinner. It was absolutely delicious, if a little messy. Leith also approved the dish and although he managed to eat most of it, a great deal of it ended up in his hair and on his face and hands. Directly after dinner I stripped him bare and shuffled him upstairs to the shower. As we stood in the bathroom waiting for the water to heat up he grinned up at me impishly from behind a veil of tomato sauce (which I regretfully did not get a picture of), delicately showing me his sauce-covered hands, telling me how dirty they were.
Five full minutes later the water was still running cold. This is when I started to panic and called down to S. to check the hot water tank in the basement. Immediately images of our belongings floating on a sea of dirty basement water crossed my mind and I blocked it out quickly. Perhaps the tank was just empty…S. had done the dishes before dinner hadn’t he? S.’s response to my slightly panicked query was that I should let the water run longer – and under his breath I’m sure he muttered something about how women are truly useless…but we’ll never know. After another few minutes I called to him again, explaining that I thought there was something very wrong with our water tank as the hot water was still running cold after almost ten minutes. He reluctantly got up off the couch and headed down the stairs. Within about 10 seconds I hear a yelp and him running back up the stairs telling me that the water tank had burst.
Luckily we have a sloped basement and all of our things were in the higher part and there is actually a drain within ten feet of our hot water tank – the house Gods were looking down on us on Friday. Nothing was damaged except for a box of laundry detergent, a few dust bunnies and perhaps my own desire to continue to own our house. The tank was replaced over the weekend and everything went quite smoothly all things considered. Of course on top of replacing the hot water tank we now also have to replace the furnace (it’s a long story), and that absolutely has to be done in the next few weeks.
As I stood in my kitchen on Monday afternoon kneading dough I just kept telling myself that it could be worse. We’ve been through much worse. Things can always be worse. I think the gastronomic reflexology helped more than the mantra; nonetheless I felt much better afterwards. Of course, the smell of fresh-baked bread tends to be a cure-all for anything that might ail me.