Drip, Drip

I was so good at posting here at the beginning of January, but now it's been almost a month again without a post. I gotta blame the leaks. 

I discovered the first leak one rainy night down in our basement garage in the space under the front steps. Water pouring down both interior walls of the wedge-shaped space. Water soaking the scrap wood and pooling in the sleds we stored there. Water dripping from the boards above onto my head where I stood peering around with my headlamp on. Water seeping into the garage.

And, on the other side of the basement, there was the mysterious flood on the laundry room floor.  The rag rug I had placed in front of the washer was soaked through and the bands of sand on the newly painted green concrete marked the water's path down the slightly sloped floor toward the front wall where it just seeped out through the foundation into the yard.  That leak, it turns out, was from a blocked sewer drain that backed up into the laundry drain and resulted in a visit from a water restoration company to deal with the sewage contamination. Our local plumber sized up the situation and recommended a new sewer lateral to replace the 80-some year clay pipe sewer.  (Did I mention that it took two of these mysterious floods before we realized it was sewage and took proper precautions?)

And then last Friday night, just as friends were arriving to share a drink before whisking Abe off to the opening of a new baseball facility, I found a puddle on the kitchen floor.  The new hardwood kitchen floor.  I opened the cabinet under the sink to find the cabinet and all its contents soaked.  The new faucet is apparently leaking quite a bit.  I wonder how long that's been going on?

I didn't write much about it here, but we moved out of our house (the dilapidated castle) for two months this fall to renovate.  The house looks so much better -- we finally tiled in the shower walls and added a fan in the bathroom to help with condensation and mold on the bedroom windows.  We replaced the pink sink and pink ceramic tile floor in the kitchen and added a soothing green granite counter top.  We painted the entire house inside and out and refinished the hardwood floors.  We planed the interior doors so they actually close, we fixed a leak in the roof, we replaced the insulation in the attic, and swapped out light fixtures.

We took care of ten years of deferred maintenance -- all the projects we should have been taking care of all along but were so busy tending to Oscar's needs (and the other two kids of course) that we just let it all go.

And now we are leaking again.

I'd probably would have been better able to cope with all of this if I wasn't already dealing with my own leaky gut.  I was diagnosed late fall (hello anxiety and sleep problems and digestion issues and headaches) and have been following a rather restrictive diet. No gluten, no dairy, no yeast or any fermented food, no sugar, no potatoes or berries or eggplant or eggs or cinnamon or mace or mint or bananas.  There's more but I can't remember it all.  I'm spending a lot of time grocery shopping and cooking and there's just so little time left for everything else.

So, it's been a month of leaks.  Meanwhile I have a lot of posts stored up in my brain. Perhaps they too will leak out onto my blog in the near future!