Grease Lightning

Happy Belated Valentine's Day to Everyone. I hope yours was filled with romance with a loved one or perhaps sadistic revenge. However you celebrate...


Mine was filled with baking and cleaning. The boy had been out of town for a few days for a work retreat, so I had to clean up the mounds of yarn and fabric that had made its way to covering our floor. I baked some delicious vegan treats. First up, heart-shaped vanilla sugar cookies with raspberry jam frosting. I added extra jam to the frosting so that way they would be pink for the holiday. I also made some peanut butter cups, but I don't have pictures of those. They were so incredibly delicious, and we ate those right away. The boy was good to me and had flowers delivered. The entire time that we have been dating, he has given me flowers twice. Both in the last month. He told me that he is going to wait a few years before giving me flowers again, just to keep me on my toes.

Our Valentine's was lovely and low-key which is how I like it. We watched part of the second season of Heros on Netflix, which could possibly be one of the greatest shows ever.


Now our Sunday took an interesting turn around 11am. Let me preface this story by describing where I live. I live in DC, in the city. The building that I live in is HUGE. Beyond massive. It has over 1,000 units in it, and most of them are breaking safety codes by the number of individuals that cram into these units. With living in this apartment building, there is just some things that can't be controlled due to the sheer number of people. 1) Bugs. I have a bug problem that I do my darnest to fight, but I can't kill them all especially when others breed them. 2) Water issues. This second problem is the topic of today's sad story.


At around 11am, I am fixing brunch for the boy and I. He is on the bed doing his Sunday ritual of coffee and Meet the Press. I am in the kitchen doing mine, fixing biscuits and gravy for the both of us. During our routines, the kitchen sink starts gurgling and talking to me. I comment to the boy that the sink is making funny noises. No answer from the boy. After another few minutes I announce that I think the neighbors are plunging their sink because ours is gurgling something fierce. The boy brushes me off, tells me he will look at it later. I continue to putter about the kitchen, when a minor explosion occurs and blackness comes spewing up out of my drain, all on my countertop/food. Many naughty words came out of my mouth after this occured. The boy and I then scrambled with all of our pots and pans scooping out black gunk from our sink and dumping the contents in our toilet. After we got the water level down, we went downstairs and bought Draino from the convinence store in our building. Within the five minutes we were gone, our sink filled back up with black gunk and was starting to overflow. Once again, we ran around scrambling with pots and pans draining our sink. The boy started plunging it to clear the drain and we poured draino in our sink, praying that the blackness would go away.

Fast forward 15 minutes....more gurgling, more explosions, more naughty words. We scrambled to call the front desk and told them send up someone to help. In the meantime, we continued to scoop black gunk from our sink. Finally our rescuers arrived, but we had a language barrier. Both the boy and I studied different romance languages in high school (me = french, him = german), and didn't have the common sense to study the all-practical spanish. After attempting to explain to our rescuers that plunging didn't work, they decided to start plunging. They had this crazy pressure plunger that had guages and knobs out the wazoo, but I don't think they were using it right. Because after five minutes of plunging....our pipes exploded. Black gunk (which we have determined to be built up grease) comes spewing out extremely fast at this point, filling my cabinets, spilling to our floor and spreading out through our apartment. Literally tens and tens of gallons of grease came out of my pipes.

At this point, I began to reconsider my marvelous idea of decorating our apartment in white towels and rugs.

After spending an hour observing the maintainence men snake/fix my pipes, they left. I then was left with a big mess. I grumbled to myself for hours as I cleaned, scrubbing my toilet for the second time in 24 hours, and mopping my floor again and again and again. I then had the pleasure of cleaning ALL my dishes by hand. But at least I looked fabulous while doing so, wearing my fashionable leopard print rubber gloves, courtesy of my mom :)





After all was said and we done, we did get to go out and enjoy some daylight. I made some scarfs this past week and wanted to show them off/get some pictures of them for my etsy shop.