There's a plumber in my bedroom

Get your mind out of the gutter.* Geesh. People make such assumptions these days.

Really, though, in the morning, my room will welcome a plumbing crew, ready to tear up my carpet and cut a hole in the floor. It’s only fitting, really, as the room has also welcomed firefighters in the past (the fun of chimney fires). You see, my fine sense of misadventure is not only applicable when I’m travelling; it follows me everywhere. Usually my time at home, though limited, is rather uneventful – not to say boring… ahem – and pleasantly interspersed with biking, playing soccer with my beastly chocolate lab, or reading on the porch swing. Every once in a while, though, something happens to spice it up… like a pipe leak.

Please, someone explain to me how a leak in the basement requires a plumbing crew to hack up the floor of two bedrooms on the second story? That is, however, apparently the case. And of course, though the house includes 6 bedrooms -being, originally, a 5 child household, planned and built by my stepfather- the leaking pipe has kindly chosen to wreak havoc on the rooms of the 3 children still here (for the moment)… aka, the most difficult to clean out.

[Note: The leak made its unwelcome presence known in my stepbrother’s room, certifiably the messiest of the house... probably of most houses. The originating pipe, however, is apparently accessed just beneath the wall that separates my room and my stepsister’s… well, her closet, to be precise, which is (was) packed with enough clothes to stock a small Salvation Army outlet store. Meanwhile, the clearing out of my room corner on the opposite side of the wall involved the moving of an antique wooden dresser, paintings and a stone bust (art class relics), Ghanaian wood carvings, a trunk of books, and various odds and ends I have yet to organize since my return… and, of course, important things like a jar of nutella and Abuelita hot chocolate.]

The bright side – because really, there always ought to be something in there to enjoy – Dani and I, thus forced into cleaning, have relocated to the center of a now exceedingly cluttered room and are rediscovering the ‘90s in the form of jean jackets, a koala bear fanny pack, a secret map we’d created with places like “Oddskinbodskins,” and, one of my personal favorites, a barrel of monkeys.

*gutter: That is, the metaphorical gutter, of course. Pun definitely unintended. Terrible.