Klowns in my Koffee

Daily Kup (Literally, this time)
The blessed people at Caribou Coffee sell a medium cup of their Coffee of the Day for $1 on Mondays. This makes Monday a wonderful day for those of us who are cheap, caffeine-deficient, and behind schedule on their projects.

I have two large projects looming: the siding repair/external painting of my house and a garage sale planned to remove ephemera while creating profit. Neither project is chunking along as planned and both need a ton of work, inspiration and luck. And a great big cup of coffee.

Beans and Hot Water
Yesterday, we found an archived voicemail that brought back memories of an unusual and unfortunately still open chapter in our family's checkered history. My husband thought that I had blogged this long ago. He doesn't read the blog regularly and harbors a suspicion that I follow him around to document any ineptitude on his part. Yes, that's my reason for being. Please don't tell.

Five-year-old Princess Potatohead (or Potatoehead to you, Dan Quayle) has thrown a panicked screaming fit each and every time that a faucet has been turned on for the last year. This is 20% of her life and is starting to feel like a significant portion of mine as well. There is only one person in the house who is now allowed to run the bath water. It is a sacred mantle that I wear with pride. Like a Japanese tea ceremony, there are elaborate nuances. The water pourer's eyes must never leave the incoming flow. If one attempts something silly like stepping out of the room for a moment, the Princess attaches herself to the doorframe like a psychotic spider monkey while yelling at the top of her lungs and barring all passage. Water must never go higher than the top of the knee of a child seated in the tub with outstretched legs.

How did this all start? Almost exactly one year ago, my husband decided to tighten the knob on a bathtub faucet that spun annoyingly with minimal purchase while the showerer crouched in frustration below, attempting to get the correct temperature through force of will. Later, he would explain that it was a simple enough task that it was unnecessary to turn off the water supply. Later than that, it would become clear that this was a convenient excuse. But I digress.

I was at work at the time of the great restaging of Genesis. Reconstruction and witness accounts imply that while chanting "Righty-Tighty, Lefty-Loosey," my husband may have nudged the valve outward one rotation too far. The valve retaliated by launching itself directly and forcefully into his face. The impact threw him backward in a tub made even more slippery by the gush of water coming out of the wall. One's natural inclination is to try to stem the flow by sticking a hand over it. This sent water spraying over every surface of the tiny bathroom, floor to ceiling.

My husband is a good man. But in a stressful situation, James Bond he is not. He was both shaken and stirred. A natural tenor, when upset his voice moves to a pitch heard by neighborhood dogs. He started screaming. The children started screaming. He started yelling at the children to stop screaming. Abandoning the Little Dutch Boy strategy, he made his sodden way to the basement to attempt to find the cut-off as water poured from and into the wall. There are all kinds of knobs in our utility room between the city water supply, water heater, the pump for our well, and an unused water conditioner. Some of them don't do anything unless they are turned in the correct order. There is a similar puzzle in Myst.

Sloshing back to the now soggy bathroom, my husband called me from his cell phone and left a message. And, oh, what a message. Someday, archaeologists will find it and wonder about the society that produced it. And then they will file it with the one left by a T Rex that said in dino-speak, "Sheesh, that asteroid is getting really REALLY close ..."

When I played the voicemail at work, I thought it was a joke. We'd get the occasional crank call and the only surprising element was that we didn't get more. Some of you former co-workers may have heard it before. I had a habit of playing the recording when situations were really, really bad because few jewels of nature capture the essence of disaster so well.

I should mention that he found the shut-off before I heard the message so all ended relatively well if not a bit watery.

Without further ado, here is the reason for my daughter's water trauma. Others more clever than I have described this audio as the sound of someone backing a car over Mrs. Doubtfire. Judge for yourselves.

The Great Flood: The Sequel