The Great Flood

This weekend I had a lot of downtime, which lately has been pretty unusual. I used this time to clean up my apartment, but pretty soon my place was spotless and I still had all this time on my hands. So I wrapped some Christmas presents, but quickly ran out of gift boxes, so that hit a dead-end as well. I decided I would get ahead of laundry for once, which almost never happens. I am more of an uh oh I am out of underwear, I guess I better do some laundry kind of gal. So I started a load. Then I took it one step further and even began to hand wash all the sweaters and delicate tops that usually just sit in the pile month after month and never get worn again. So I poured some Woolite into the sink, popped the sweater in and turned the faucet on to let it fill with water.

And then, for whatever reason, I left.

I took the trash out, turned the Christmas tree lights on, lit some candles and basked in my oh-so-clean and festive apartment. I turned on the TV and did some crunches (man I was on a role!). I did a couple sets of lunges. I sat there and thought to myself hmm what I am forgetting. Gus was walking around meowing kind of weird so I followed him into the bedroom to see if he wanted to play. Then I heard a strange sound and glanced into the bathroom. It sounded like flowing water. My first thought was CRAP my toilet is overflowing! But no. Then it hit me. I never turned the water off to fill the sink up.

The sink was beyond full. It must have been running for at least ten or fifteen minutes. There was water running down the cabinets and spilling onto the floor. The entire bathroom floor was covered in water, about a half inch thick. I went into full blown panic mode. Is the water going to spill through and flood the apartment below me?? Will I get mold damage?? How will I ever get all this water out?? Will I have to call the maintenance people, who will in turn come to clean up and find the illegal cat that I am hiding without paying my $300 pet deposit?!?! My heart was racing and my hands were shaking as a frantically grabbed every towel I owned and threw them onto the floor. They all quickly soaked up full of water, so I threw them into the bathtub and did the next most logical thing I could think of to control the mess… I reached into the laundry hamper and started throwing dirty clothes all over the puddles of water. So I got all the water mopped up, but was left with a tub full of soaking wet towels and clothes. So much for getting ahead of the laundry.

I spent the rest of the day and most of the next doing laundry and trying to get all those towels dry again. My little washer/dryer in my apartment is not only tiny, but its not the strongest machine out there, so towels take 2-3 cycles in the dryer before really drying out. But the good news is that since my bathroom floor was all wet and slippery, I went ahead and grabbed the mop to give it a good scrubbing. That hasn’t happened in… oh four or five months.