The house at poo corner

Hey ho, tomorrow I take the GRE. My prolongued vocabulary cram session has left my brain feeling, as Spike would have said (when he was a wiener of a poet) "effulgent."

C and I have had further adventures with our apartment. Last Sunday, after, oh, five years of touch-and-go troubles and a weekend of heavy use by guests with unsteady bowels, the plumbing in our upstairs bathroom kicked the bucket. Long-accumulating wads of toilet paper and human waste finally occluded the passage of water & waste from the toilet down to the nether network of Tbilisi's sewer system.

We were unaware of this development until the toilet was inadvertently left running overnight. The clogged pipe burst (right above our kitchen, go figure) and saturated the surrounding structural elements (namely -- well, no, exclusively -- concrete) with foul smelly water, and by the early hours of the following morning, all manner of effluvia was raining into our kitchen, bringing with it tiny turds of The People's Building Material.

We waited for a sane hour, then called our Georgian friend, Nino. She called our landlady. Our landlady called her man-friend. He called a plumber. They all came over and poked at the toilet, concluded that the floor needed to torn up, and left. About a week later (after a few false alarms), the plumber returned, and did just that. He removed a functionless (but pretty) concrete-and-tile facade that was unhelpfully encasing the leaky, blocked pipe, and replaced it with a new pipe. He gave us all of the salvaged tile to keep (in case we want to make a bathroom mosaic, I guess), and left. He is supposedly returning this weekend to outfit this new working pipe with a fresh casing of concrete and tile.(!).

Until the new plumbing 'takes,' we have directed our needs (and those of our guests) to the seemingly dependable downstairs facilities. Yesterday, after a month free of noissome odors, that bathroom was suddenly possessed of a rank and unmistakable stink: eau de merde.

C and I tried our usual tricks to expell the smell. Matches, deoderizers, obsessive-compulsive multiple flushing -- all to no avail. Finally, I happened to glance down at the floor during one of my conservation-be-damned marathon toilet-flushing sessions, and saw, through the cute, tear-drop eyelets in the drain on the floor, a flicker of movement.

What the...?

C removed the drain cover, and we found ourselves face-to-feces with the backed-up sewage from our supposedly staid, obedient toilet. YUCK!

A bottle of bleach and a gallon of hot water, plus some aggressive work with a plunger, forced the foul matter to retreat a ways and somewhat obviated the GAAAAH! and reflexive gagging that I was reduced to in the face of the fecal sneak-attack.

Unfortunately, out of sight does not equal out of scent. I ended up tearing off a piece of plastic shopping bag and using that to seal the floor-drain. Voila! No more bad smell. And only a scintilla of doubt: if the plumbing on this floor backs up, will it rupture and flood the apartment below? But like I said, only a scintilla. After all, I'd rather our plumbing rain hell on the people living below us than make another diluvial delivery at our doorstep. (Does that make me a bad neighbor? Ah, well...).

Now our downstairs bathroom smells as it should -- not like roses, exactly, but not like a shit-monster, either -- and we are able to go about our business blithely unbothered by the stew of sewage potentially amassing under our pretty tile floor. Hooray!

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Well, it's 10 PM. Time for me to give up on last-minute Analytic Writing strategizing and put my stuffed head to bed. I dread the stupid GRE writing sections. I'm inappropriately excited for the Verbal bits and Math Be Damned.

Nighty night, all. Wish me luck.