Channeling Noah

Steve Carell, stand aside. Take it from this postdiluvian, floods aren’t fun! Last night, as I was trying to muster enough willpower to get myself out of bed and pack my bags, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten a load of laundry in the washer. With some encouragement (or mockery) from Nina, I managed to traverse the great 9-foot divide between my bed and the laundry room. Opening the door, I discovered that the simple task of transferring my clothing into the dryer would be much more complex than anticipated. The washing machine had flooded the floor of the room.

It turns out that said washing machine normally drains itself through a pipe into a basin in the laundry room. (That’s what that sink is for…) However, the culprit of this crime against desiccation was a wash cloth that somehow found its way to the bottom of the sink, over the drain.

I didn’t really know what to do. The floor was covered in quite a bit of water, and there weren’t that many things that I could use to soak up the water. I ran and got my roommate Maisha (who was the one who figured out the cause of the problem), and she suggested that I use some newspapers to contain the spill. Yikes, I thought… That would require a lot of newspapers. However, I luckily am a huge packrat for newspapers because I regularly read the El Pregonero and the Washington Hispanic to practice my Spanish while riding the Washington Metro. To save them for “later review,” I dutifully shove them into my bag. This process of review rarely happens, though, and the newspapers ultimately end up in a Trader Joe’s bag in my room.

Here’s a picture of the lovely flood relief effort:

After letting the newspapers sit for a while, I went back to find that they were remarkably effective at absorbing the water. The clothing in the washer needed an extra spin cycle since they had not been drained effectively. After setting that up, I disposed of the soggy periodicals and returned to difficult task of packing my bags for a 4-day trip. In other words, I crawled back into bed, only to wake up at 5 a.m. with no bags packed and a load of wet laundry. Crudcakes. But given that I’m waiting for my flight in the Greensboro (NC) airport, it seems that everything ended up working out. However, I really need to fix my sleep cycle…