It's a Monday

Though I try to avoid the Monday mentality, some Mondays do seem to have a mind of their own, regardless of the mindset we choose. Just to give you some perspective into my glamorous Eastern European life, here's a small anecdote from the past 24 hours:

Late last evening, the neighbor immediately below me in this stairwell came tapping at my door with a problem. Something from my bathroom was leaking into hers, and after investigating first mine and then following her downstairs to examine hers, we decided that a small pool of water on my bathroom floor was the culprit. It's an area that nearly always stays wet, but after sponging up the water, I hoped the problem would be resolved. My neighbor below was indubitably hoping the same, though she must have doubted my capacity to fix a single thing upon seeing me standing perplexed at the door in my bright purple knee socks with obnoxious pink hearts on the side.

This morning, I woke up with a start-the-day-right kind of resolve, but as I wandered into the bathroom still rubbing my eyes, an alarming sound bore into my consciousness: dripping. Oh blessed Providence, something is dripping. Pulling back the shower curtain, I saw plump water droplets heaving themselves off the bottom of the hot-water tank and plummeting down to the drain. Leaning in to examine the situation, I noticed that one of the metal pipes attached from somewhere inside the wall to the bottom of the tank was leaking. Since it appeared to just be loose, I gingerly reached up to screw it on tighter. No sooner had I even touched the little sucker, and the pipe came flying off, shooting hot scalding water onto my left hand and face. I leapt back completely stunned and watched as the only source of hot water in my apartment pounded in a pressurized stream into the bottom of the bathtub. The water was so acutely hot that steam started rolling up in clouds, filling the bathroom, seeping out the door, and hanging heavily in the hallway. Pacing in the fog bewildered, I could see that the tank was bound and determined to empty itself, and I could also see that the water pouring down a section of wall narrowly tucked alongside the bathtub was undoubtedly seeping into the ceiling of my neighbor's bathroom below. Oh heavens! As I grabbed towels and stuffed them against the wall and along the floor, it struck me that the steaming water in the tub had turned rust orange -- oh Lord, what do I do? The little red handle next to the water meter beneath the sink presented itself as my only hope; with a tug downward, the water supply was off -- and the dripping that began the disaster was the only sound that remained.

The little situation in the bathroom is still in a fix and needing to be fixed, and though the necessary fix is going to involve some complications, my left hand is not bemoaning the lack of hot water since it still feels as if it's on fire. My fix for that situation: I pulled a new container of yogurt from the fridge, pried off the lid, and stuck my hand into it. So much for those probiotics!

It's a Monday in Romania, and I've a new start-the-day-right kind of plan: more yogurt.