Joys of Working From Home

This is literally what just happened to me.

Every room in my house is nice and cozy, except the kitchen, which has two outside walls and a tile floor (and a bit of a draft around the floor). But the kitchen has the best light and a nice clear workspace, so I decide to work there. It's 12 degrees outside, so my feet are cold. I go upstairs to get a pair of socks.

On the way to my socks, I notice that the window in the TV room has started dripping again. We have elderly box gutters and were in denial about the drips for a year or so, which means that when snow starts melting from the sun, there are a few places where the water backs up and seeps through the box gutters and into the house at the window frame below the gutter. And we got 20" of snow on Friday night. I have a vast knowledge of how to rig dry-cleaning bags and buckets to deal with the drips, and we lean out the windows of the third floor clearing ice with a hockey stick and buckets of warm water. When you hear great crashing sounds, you know the downspouts are clearing and you're done.

So I head up to the third floor and start clearing the gutter above the TV room window. That goes pretty well, a little ice flicking and about four buckets of water, and I hear crashing sounds and the water drains well. I go to check on the other problem gutter, spend some time pitching ice out of it, and decide to use the tiny battery-operated pump (which I bought but never used for the basement flooding that has since been fixed) to drain some standing water out of that gutter. Okay. Third floor secured.

So I head downstairs to check on the TV room. And a mysterious water disaster has occurred. The bucket is askew and apparently a gallon or two of water has pooled on the carpet and run into the room, stopping to get soaked up by the big floor pillow we have there. Replace the bucket, pick up the floor pillow and get it drying in the bathroom, deploy all the ShamWows (you'll say "wow" every time!) I can find, along with some towels. Run downstairs to the basement twice, once for a plastic shelf gadget to get the bucket off the wet carpet and once for a fan to help the carpet dry. Hang soaked ShamWows in the bathroom to dry.

Check on the bedroom window for drips. Still dry.... Count my blessings. The front of the house didn't get much sun today.

Okay, everything's drying, nothing's actively dripping except some stragglers in the TV room that are going into the bucket. I need to change the wet band-aid on my thumb (I cut myself mysteriously while digging out my car yesterday). Okay. Back to the kitchen to work.

My feet are cold.