Monday was the hottest day this year. Ironically, this is the day my hot water decided to break down. After a lovely few days at our island getaway, I returned Sunday night only to discover that come Monday morning my water was stone cold. Boiling the kettle for a bath took me back to the great Gas crises of a decade or so back when we had no hot water for days. Mum would boil the kettle and Dad created a makeshift shower contraption from a few tubes and a bucket. He is clever like that. I created a shallow bath and thanked god for hairspray and bobby pins. I am not clever like that.
When the electrician rocked around Tuesday morning and fixed my hot water service, I had already endured a cold shower (I HAD to wash my hair!). I know it was 43 degrees, and no less than 30 degrees overnight but a cold shower is much more pleasant when you have the hot to take off the chill. I endured the chill. It was fricken freezing!!
Come Wednesday morning, I couldn’t wait to enjoy my first hot shower since Sunday – the thought of washing my hair properly and being able to stand under the water instead of putting one limb in at a time hokey pokey style. The alarm went off and I threw off the blanket and struggled out of bed.
Some of you probably are not aware of this, but I wear contact lenses. When I get up in the morning, I can’t see a lot. It is only from doing the same thing everyday that I know the way to the bathroom and the shower before I put in my lenses immediately after. This morning I took about 5 steps from my bed before I was stopped in my tracks.
Water. Everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Sometime between me going to bed last night at 11pm and getting up at 6am my laundry space has flooded and now water covers most of the laundry and dining room. Its on the tile, the carpet, seeping through the bottom of my washing basket and soaking through the bottom of a cardboard box filled with books.
I don’t know much about plumbing, or electricity for that matter, but it seems to me that this water is coming up through the floor. I don’t know how, or why, but it does. When you walk on the tile, water squeezes between the squares. I moved my dining table to discover damp spots where the legs had sat. I’ve used a dozen towels (and they are all sopping wet, now in the laundry sink) and still there is water everywhere.
Considering I don’t have a dryer – or a clothesline – I’m now thinking about how I am going to wash all these towels, how I am going to dry the floor now that the heatwave is over and all the work I am going to have to catch up on since I keep having to wait at home for tradespeople.
If nothing else though, I do have to laugh at the irony of having no hot water on the hottest day of the year, followed by truckloads of the stuff as soon as it gets cool again. Dorothea McKeller was right – Australia is the home of drought and flooding rains.
