(re-run)
The first bad luck, or maybe good luck depending on how you look at it, was me finding out that the colorless bump above my eyelid turned out to be nodular basal cell carcinoma. The Mohs surgery went well, and I’ll be able to change the bandage and take a shower by the time you read this.
The second bad thing is that there is a leak in the garage. After speaking with the insurance estimator and two plumbers, the consensus is that when I added 300 sq feet to that side of the house in 2015, including part of the garage wall where the water heater is, the construction guys cut off the outside drain line for the water heater and left the uncapped pipe in the garage wall. Now the interior wall is covered with mold, and according to one plumber, there is mold in the crawl space as well.
The third bad thing is that the first plumber, who crawled under the house and then tried to upsell me into replacing all the copper pipes in the crawl space for some new wonder plastic, left the trap door cover to the crawl space open. It is in my master bedroom closet. I discovered it a few hours later after I sent him packing. His bid for a new water heater was almost $4000. I just replaced the water heater in my other house a few years ago for $2000. I told him it was too much.
That night I slept well and got up at 5:15 for my eyelid surgery. The next night, however, I heard rustling sounds coming from the corner of my bedroom. Every time I’d drift off to sleep, the sounds would wake me up. Was it a rat from under the house that had come in through the hole in my closet floor? I ended up moving to my moved-to-Baltimore-daughter’s bedroom and sleeping there. I tore apart my bedroom the next day looking for signs of a rodent. I didn’t find any but discovered that my black-out curtains had totally disintegrated in the window that gets the hot western sun. As I took them down, the air was filled with dust and tiny particles of black-out coating. The eight-foot-wide window sill had mildew on it. I’d been sleeping in this room all winter. No wonder I’ve been coughing every morning.
I dusted, vacuumed, sorted, and rearranged everything that I’d parked in my bedroom to keep it from getting broken or thrown away by other family members, boyfriends, or handy women – good stuff, antique stuff, plus clothes for my grandson.
Three bad things had occurred in a short amount of time. Days with the water turned off. The insurance guy said the water was dripping at a gallon a minute. I turned the water back on this morning to take a bath and wash my hair, after having to keep my wound bandage dry for 48 hours.
Skin cancer, water leak, and rodent, these are the three bad things. I still haven’t found the rat. Time to clean out another closet.
P.S. There was no rodent. It turned out to be an alligator lizard and it was in the house for 2 weeks before we had our face-to-face confrontation in the entryway.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 