Barb’s Burblings

Oh, it’s been an exciting weekend. And by “exciting,” I mean “my bathroom exploded.”
I got home on Friday to find both my kitchen sink and bathroom sink coated in blank gunk. That was a bad sign. I called my landlord. It was too late on Friday to have his normal plumber come over, but he’d send over a handyman in the morning. A couple of times, the plumbing went GLURP, spewing more blank gunk. I woke up to find both sinks full of black water. Fun! The handyman comes, snakes the sinks, gets rid of the water. OK. The toilet is still acting a bit oddly, but whatever.
I head out mid-afternoon to get a haircut and then to a Baysox game. The haircut is good; the game, not so much. I head home, stopped to pick up some Ben & Jerry. This was definitely a Good Idea.
I walk in the door at 11 to a nasty odor. I look in the kitchen sink–it’s clean. I take a couple of steps toward the bathroom. The carpet squelches. The bathroom has a charming layer of water (I thankfully hung the bathmat on the shower curtain, as it had gotten a bit damp earlier). There are green, leafy bits sticking out from the closed toilet lid and scattered around the floor. The corner of the rug in my bedroom closest to the bedroom is also wet.
The landlord sends over the handyman, who quickly realizes that this is not something he can handle. He calls the landlord, and gamely starts using my mop to get the water out of the bathroom. He and the landlord futz around with everything, and wind up calling a Professional Plumber, who isn’t available until morning. The landlord and handyman leave around 1:45. In the morning. Whee!
The Professional Plumber shows up around 9. Turns out my upstairs neighbors’ garbage disposal overloaded, or something. Every time they flushed or let any water down their drains…my plumbing spewed stuff. It takes a few tries, but finally everything is fixed. It only took the Professional Plumber 2.75 hours. Fun!
So now things are fine, except the lingering bad smell in the bathroom and my lack of rugs. It royally screwed up my plans for the weekend, but what can you do? The thing that gets me is the one rug I had considered replacing is the only one I don’t need to replace. Hey, at least rugs are on sale at this time of year, and my landlord will be chipping in.