*Squish*

Yes, my buds. I'm back from my annual Christmas Girls Weekend. It was interesting, to say the least.

Well, actually, the Girls Weekend part of it was just a fun weekend. We went to Winston-Salem, NC, and stayed in a nice hotel that was actually more like a luxury condo. We shopped and drank and went out to eat, and watched TV and lolled around and laughed ourselves crazy. I bought a few Christmas gifts, some stuff for myself, and I spent way too much of my special set-aside "Christmas Gift Cash" for a pair of shoes for myself that were too expensive, but I really liked them. So Merry Christmas to me.

But the real part of the story started before we even left.

Friday morning when I was getting ready for work, I heard something going on in my house that I didn't like. I was hearing a trickling behind the latticework in the laundry room. This is where my hot water heater and my furnace are. I went over to the latticework, stuck my ear right to it, and felt all around the floor there. It was dry. I used my 40-some-odd year philosophy of "When In Doubt, Call Dad," and did just that.

He asked me if I'd looked back there behind the latticework, and I told him no. What I didn't tell him was that I really didn't know how to get back there, because I couldn't find the screws to unscrew it and open it. Anyway his answer was, "If the floor's not wet, I wouldn't worry about it," so I hung up the phone and went to work.

But you know me. I worry.

When I came back home at 1pm to get my suitcase and be picked up for the trip south, I walked by the latticework. Trickle trickle. It was worrying me. So I popped my head out the door and said, "Go pick up the other girls and come back to get me last, I need to investigate this." And I picked up my handy tool chest.

After a lot of searching, I finally found the magic screws that opened the latticework. I opened it up, and standing there, like the big cylinder of hate that it is, was my water heater. The pipes leading into it were wet. The floor underneath it was wet.

By the time all this had happened, all the girls had been picked up and were raring to go. I went to the door and flagged them inside. So inside were the four of us, the TheCompanyIWorkFor Girls, looking at my water heater. One of us knows her home improvement stuff. Another is semi-knowledgable. The other two are pretty much hopeless (I'm in that category).

In the following moments we: turned off the gas to the heater, turned off the water to the heater. Opened the hot water faucets and drained them. Took the garden hose out back and strung it through the laundry room window in an effort to drain some of the water from the tank outside. (That was a joke.) We put towels under and around the heater to soak up the excess water, of which there was much too excess of for that to work very well.

During all of this, one of us had to go to the bathroom, and we discovered there was a large portion of my living room floor that was wet. Wet wet. Very wet. Then we discovered there was water against the wall behind my sofa. It was a worrying thing.

We put towels on the floor to soak (I'm officially out of towels, people). It was at this point I asked the girls, "Do I need to stay home, or will that just be two and a half days of sitting here in a wet house?" And the answer, which, granted, came from three women with their asses on fire to get in the car and drive, answered, "There's no reason to stay here."

So I called the plumber, who wasn't there, because he's never there, I think he hangs upside down like a bat 22 hours of most days, and I left him a message. The message told what was wrong, that I'd be gone, and we gave him San's husband's phone number for contact. And we left. And the women's fiery asses were extinguished.

Cut to one Girls Weekend later....

We got home about 5pm today. Unloading was fun. We had so much shit in the car we were afraid to hit the brakes lest we be beaned in the head by flying gifts. So we got to my house first and the unloading began.

This is how things work for me. I got out, opened my door, and proceeded to go get some bags out of the vehicle. In the meantime, the other girls were looking for my stuff as well. I brought the bags I'd gotten inside and put them in the chair. My suitcase, two very large and heavy appliances, and about four bags were retrieved by the others. They set them at the vehicle, basically where they'd gotten them, and said, "Goodbye," driving into the sunset while I carried all the stuff from my driveway into the house by myself.

Once inside, I was excited (not in a happy, Christmas morning kind of a way, but more in an anxious, pushing the door back in a haunted house kind of a way) to see what the house was like. Everything was as it was when I left. Old broken water heater. Turns out the plumber is still hanging upside down like a bat and won't unearth himself till tomorrow.

The floor still has the wet spots - I mean serious wet spots, and that's really all I'm worried about at this point, that the water's going to cause problems. The way I figure it, the water heater's just one more thing about owning a house, I can replace it now or in the future. I just don't want water damage to my carpet, floor, sofa, or anything else, for that matter.

So I'm here at home for tonight. I can't bathe or wash clothes, but I'll live. I've got clean clothes, and I can go take a shower at my sister's.

And so it goes at the Poderosa. But it begs the question: if a girl's really really good, does Santa bring wet vacs and water heaters?