Let the Record Show That We Flooded Our House Yet Again

For reasons too boring and self-inflicted to go into right now, this week has been one of the busiest of my life so far. By Sunday afternoon, I had just five days to accomplish at least 37,976 things – including editing two full-length novels – before going away for a week, and I was feeling pretty damn stressed about it all. So, naturally, that was the day our house flooded for what must be the kazillionty-third time.

I hesitate to mention this right now, given that there’s an ACTUAL WAR going on and all. I mean, would you READ THE ROOM, Amber? This is, however, my diary, and it has an entire category dedicated to all of the times my house has flooded, so I figured it would be remiss of me not to at least mention it in passing, if only for the sake of completeness.

It was the washing machine this time.

I think it might actually have been the washing machine one of the other times too, now I come to think of it, but, to be totally honest, when your house floods as often as ours does, they all kind of blend into each other, you know?

Anyway, the washing machine has been threatening to break down for months now. Years, even. We’ve had someone out to fix it on multiple occasions over the last two years, and every time it’s happened, we’ve told ourselves that, next time, we’d just buy a new washing machine, and then smash the old one up in a rage, to the tune of ‘Damn, It Feels Good to Be Gangsta”.

But we didn’t.

And we should have.

Because, when we came home from a visit with Terry’s brother on Sunday afternoon, we discovered that the washing machine had broken once again, and was now holding our clothes hostage inside it. It was still filled with water, but when Terry pressed the button that’s supposed to drain it, MORE water appeared instead, then even MOAR WATER after that.

Well, obviously there’s a limit to how much water a washing machine can take, so pretty soon the water had started leaking out onto the kitchen floor – which, you may recall, has been leaked on more times than I care to recall at this point, but which has somehow always lived to tell the tale.

This time, however, the floor did NOT live to tell the tale.

Moment of silence for my kitchen floor, please.

No, even though we immediately sprang into action with our now well-practiced Flood Protocol (Towels, mops, DRAMA…), the washing machine continued to leak, the floor continued to flood, and Max continued to ask if he could PLEASE have something to eat now. (That last bit doesn’t have anything to do with the flood, obviously, but it did add an extra frisson of stress to the situation, and made me feel a bit like I was in some kind of weird game show where I was expected to somehow mop up a flood and make spaghetti bolognese at the same time.)

Anyway.

The new washing machine was delivered yesterday.

The kitchen floor is (hopefully) getting ripped up today, so that Terry can replace the damaged planks with spare ones which he’s been keeping in the loft for just this eventuality.

We’re going away for a week on Friday morning, so I’ll probably slot in a fake-tan disaster for tomorrow, and then our week will be complete. Yes.

(In slightly better house-related news, Terry also built some shelves this week in the living room. The canvas print, meanwhile, is c/o Photowall Sweden, and is one of my favourite things ever.)

As I said at the start of this post, I hesitated to mention this at all, because I’m very aware that there are much worse things going on in the world right now than a flooded kitchen, and if that’s the worst thing that happens to us, we can count ourselves pretty lucky, all things considered.

I said this on Instagram earlier in the week, but I don’t tend to address world events much on the Internet – not because I don’t care, or am completely oblivious to them, but because I frequently feel overwhelmed by them, and my coping mechanism is to focus on the smaller, less scary things happening in my own life, rather than the huge, terrifying ones going on in the world.

This week I’ve been actively avoiding social media, because, to be totally honest, my anxiety about the situation in Ukraine has been spiraling, and the internet hasn’t exactly been helping with that. I’ve been reading the news, of course, and keeping everyone affected in my thoughts, but at times like this there’s an overwhelming pressure to be seen to be saying something, and, right now, I don’t honesty feel there’s much I can say that other people haven’t already said, far more eloquently than I can.

At the same time, of course, it wouldn’t feel right to just carry on as if nothing has happened, and I would hate to give anyone the impression that I consider my flooded kitchen to be more worthy of comment here than the devastating situation in Ukraine. So I hope you’ll forgive what probably seems like a very irrelevant post right now, and understand that this blog is simply a place for me to record the minutiae of my life. The absence of political commentary or current events here doesn’t mean I don’t care about them – it just means I’m struggling to know what to say, and am choosing to stay in my lane while I figure it out.

And, with that said, let the record show that we flooded our house.

Again.

[Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash]