This was to be a relaxing and enjoyable weekend, but, as Wee Robbie Burns says, things gang aft agley (go often askew) and this weekend was no exception.

Friday, Nae had a doctor's appointment that she had to reschedule because she got caught in a traffic jam behind an accident. So she headed to Barnes and Noble to peruse for awhile and I picked her up there and we went to Mitchell's Fish Market. This was, in no small part due to an incident that happened a couple of weeks ago. Nae had been jonesing for the lobster pasta at Red Lobster and I took her, though I am no big fan of what the restaurant has become. Suffice it to say that it met all my expectations, down to the rubbery lobster tail. I had promised her then that I'd take her to a real seafood restaurant so we went to Mitchell's, which was outstanding and exquisite and worth every penny. On the way back to the car we passed through B&N and I picked up the complete Wallace & Gromit collection, because Nae had never seen them and I knew she'd like A Close Shave, which we watched, followed by A Grand Day Out.

Yesterday, Nae went to her sock club and I ran errands. When I picked her up, she said that one of the ladies at sock club told her about a great sale at a yarn store in KY, which Nae assumed to be the one I took her to last year. But, when we got there, it was no longer there so we went to Pompilio's. Alas, by this time, the head cold I had been fighting for a week had taken a turn for the worse into a sinus infection so I had to ask Nae if the food was good because I couldn't actually taste anything. We came home, watched the remaining two W&G shorts, The Wrong Trousers  and A Matter of Loaf and Death, which I didn't even know was out so that was a bonus. By the time we turned in it was rather late, after 12:30 or so.

Today I was going to write some blog posts (not this one) and possibly work on a couple of electronic projects before Nae and I went off to see Alice in Wonderland. It's at this point that the schemes gang agley. I got up, stepped into the kitchen to throw something away and took a step where I noticed my sock was wet. Very wet and cold. My first thought was that one of our two lovelies was expressing displeasure about something. It's a rare occurrence but possibly there had been an accident. So I turned to flip on the light and my other sock got wet, which would have been a very long puddle. With the light on I could see it was a largish puddle of water with no obvious sign of origin. So I went an opened our front door onto the common hallway to see a very large puddle staining the carpet.

So, I dragged out the steam cleaner and sucked up the water. Then I woke Nae up and called maintenance. Then I headed out to bring Nae back coffee because she really couldn't work in the kitchen. Maintenance showed up a couple hours later (he doesn't live on premises and that's pretty good response time for early on Sunday morning). I had already emptied the steam cleaner's reservoir a couple of times by then and water wasn't pouring in but it was still consistently pooling. He took a look and stepped out to investigate. A few minutes later he came back to tell us that the problem lay in the third floor. The apartment next to ours is empty and the apartment above it is empty but the third floor apartment, well, they had a small problem. The maintenance man said that the tenant explained that she had come home last night to find the toilet was overflowing and she had mopped it up as best she could and was taking care of it. Why she hadn't called maintenance I have no idea but he told me that water had entered and done some damage in both of the unoccupied apartments and the reason we were seeing water is that there was a one inch pool of it on the kitchen floor/ laundry area next door that had just leaked through our wall.

He had shut her water off and was cleaning up the two empty apartments. Nae and I spent the next several hours dealing with the standing water (do you know just how dirty it is under your washer and dryer? You don't want to, trust me on this, but ours are much cleaner now). Nae is showering and we'll watch the end of You Can't Take It With You that we were watching in-between vacuuming up the kitchen floor while we waited for maintenance. Then I think we'll see if we can still get out to see Alice and grab a bite to eat.

Peace, gentle readers