Day 272

Yesterday while I was cooking dinner my youngest gallops by shouting, “The toilets overflowing, the toilets overflowing,” like a seven-year old Paul Revere and then disappeared into the night.  Well actually her bedroom, but that’s not as poetic.

I launched into action, sprinting up the stairs to check the two upstairs bathroom for our one plunger—found it—brandished it like sword and  rushed back downstairs to the offending toilet to fix the situation all the while gasping for air after my race.

This is not a particularly uncommon.  We are currently living in a rental house with persnickety plumbing.  It would make sense if the house were old or on a septic system or something.  But, it is actually your pretty standard late model suburban variety.  Plus, the overflows happen randomly in all three of the bathrooms for no apparent reason.  Unlike the time several years ago when I extricated a pair of swim goggles from the toilet. I try not to dwell too much on HOW those goggles got in the pipes–nobody was talking.  No need for a root cause analysis on that one, it was pretty obvious.

Anyway, the problem with the random overflowing toilets is that we only have one plunger, which should really be enough in a three person household.  Except for some reason every time a toilet overflows, the plunger is in a different bathroom.   Then the race in on for me to locate the plunger before the water crests and I have rugs and floors to wash.

It’s an annoyance that prior to the Simple Year could have been fixed with a couple of additional plungers. Incidentally even I draw the line at USED plungers.

So, for now, we just continue to play our shell game with the one plunger and I will occasionally get a bit of bonus exercise with the plunger dash.