Drip, drop, drip, drop

I woke up this morning to a blaring light in my eyes and Justin saying, "What the heck, there's water everywhere?!?" To which, I rolled over and said, "Turn off the light please and stop all that racket." He proceeded to call the maintenance guy for our building to inform him that we had water dripping from our ceiling in the area by our bathroom, sort of a hallway. By then, I am awake, must get bucket under drip, are clothes in hall closet wet, where is water coming from... It wasn't so much a drip as a steady stream of drips - drip, drip, drip, drip... I was left to listen to the dripping and had since decided that a trip to the gym for a workout and a shower would be in order. I packed up all my stuff for running errands, gym, post-gym and off I traipse. Drop off dry-cleaning, hmm, its dark in here, hmm, woman is writing my dry cleaning ticket by hand, hmm, gym is next door, hmm, the power was out. So much for my gym effort. I learned, however, that if you want a machine that works during a power outage, get an Elyptical Trainer. So that left errands. Get to the grocery store, doesn't open until 9. Its 8:40. This never occurred to me. I am not out and about at such hours doing errands. So I read my book for a bit and then do the grocery shopping. The day proceeded much more smoothly from there. Go to local teacher resource store and buy stuff for class. Go to library to present my work from the summer for a class. Go to cobbler with five pairs of shoes to be repaired.

This was the highlight of my day. My shoes are in pretty bad shape, considering I stand and walk a lot. Some of them are several years old, some of them have just been trashed by the pavement between class and office, class and cafeteria, etc. Two pairs of heels needed new rubber stopper things, a pair of knee-high boots needed to be resoled and buffed, a pair of Simple sandals (my favorite) had an elastic piece that was on its last leg and about to break, a pair of Danskos that also had a similar problem, and one of the pairs of heels that also had elastic band failure would cost me a grand total of $58. I was pretty happy about this because it means my $90 shoe budget is now $58. I had entertained thoughts of getting new shoes, but realized I really needed to do little more than repair some of the old ones that are in good enough shape. Plus, it felt quite wasteful to get new shoes and throw away old ones. The cobbler laughed at my hack job with one of the pairs of shoes - I had actually sewed the leather to the buckle to bypass the elastic band. He thought that was pretty funny and invited me to work there.

Back to the gym, this time the lights were on and everything was functional.

My ceiling has a giant hole in it at the moment and a fan is blowing really stinking air throughout the apartment. I think I will spend the rest of my afternoon at a coffee shop reading and doing some school work. I'm just glad the ceiling decided to collapse from the water leakage while I was on vacation and not for me to find after coming home from work. That would have stunk.

In other news, the garden is very exciting at the moment. I thought the beans would never sprout and yesterday there were little sprouts. We also have the teeny beginnings of a cucumber, also cool. Check out the photos:


Beanies











Cucs