Romantic Date Night: Thwarted and Restored

Sometime last week I realized that David and I had not been on a just-the-two-of-us dinner date since we were on vacation this summer. Which was well over a month ago. We've also been on weird schedules with me staying late at school working (I know, so not cool) and David have ball games in the evenings (his team has gone to the playoffs but got rained out last night) so we haven't seen that much of each other and have had a couple of crappy evenings when it's suddenly eight o'clock and no one has thought about dinner and we're both starving and cranky.

We needed a nice date night.

Saturday night we had plans to go out to a local pizza place called Onesta that is not far from our house. It's a locally owned neighborhood place that uses a lot of local ingredients and we'd heard good things about their pesto pizza sauce from some friends. The plan was to sit outside and enjoy the nice weather and split a pizza and a carafe of house wine.

David had spent the day at the ballfield, playing a game and watching the next game. I'd done some stuff around the house, including a "pet fresh" vacuum (some sort of baking soda that is a little scented and you sprinkle it and then vacuum it up because I am always paranoid that our house might smell like dog). It was about six o'clock when David got home and said he was going to take a shower. I said I just needed to change clothes. As we had this conversation, I was throwing a load of sheets into the washing machine. I started the washer and left the kitchen.

Then suddenly David was hollering for me to get old towels as there was water coming out from under the washing machine. And backing up in the sink. It was plumbing chaos.

David decided that something was backed up somewhere. This seemed plausible to me. He went to the utility closet to look at pipes or something.

If you just rip that pipe out of the wall, honey, I am sure that will solve the problem.

While he was in the closet, I suggested that we turn on the garbage disposal and see if that would help. Then I flipped on the garbage disposal. Then water started rushing out from under the washing machine again. Oops.

After throwing old towels, t-shirt rags, and a couple of beach towels on the kitchen floor to saok up that water, David and I emptied the utility closet of all the extra crap we store in there (citronella candles, puppy pads, Chinese lanterns, and beer buckets--you know, really useful and important things). Then he started messing around in there and all of a sudden the utility closet was flooded and the house instead of smelling Pet Fresh like Arm & Hammer carpet powder smelled like skanky water.

Are we having a party? Because it looks like we're having a party. Look at these party supplies.

David tackled the problem with some sort of roto-rootering but not with a real roto-rooter (evidently that is some sort of machine? I thought it was just a long bendy stick. David used a long sort of bendy stick that went down a pipe) and the wet-vac and diminished the standing water problem. I fluttered around saying helpful things like "Well, at least it's not the toilet! That would be really gross!" and taking pictures until David told me to stop taking pictures and to assist him by dragging the garden hose into the house and standing by the front door to turn on and off the hose when David shouted. (I was simultaneously trying to watch a memorial show dedicated to Patrick Swayze but the plumbing disaster was distracting .)

We were supposed to be at a table for two. Not wet-vaccing the utility closet.

Eventually, the pipe was cleared (still no idea what caused the back up... perhaps an onion peel? There were a couple pieces of onion skin that came floating out of the utility closet but we compost those so I have no idea how/why there would have been enough of a build up in the sink to cause such problems) and we were filthy with some kind of black stuff all over David's hands and also smeared on our legs (gross). The house smelled bad like standing water and we were an hour behind schedule for our dinner date and it had started to rain.

Filthy. Stinky. Hungry for pizza.

There was a moment when we thought about calling out for Chinese and a PPV movie. But we decided to make the best of it. This was supposed to be date night after all! So David hit the shower while I sprayed anti-bacterial spray all over the floor of the utility closet where it was still damp and then I dragged in a box fan from the garage to help dry it out. Then it was my turn for a quick shower and then we went out in the rain.

Onesta was crowded and delicious-smelling and they told us it would be a 45 minute wait if we wanted to sit inside. We were starving, so we opted to be adventurous and sit outside in the rain, which by this time had slowed to a drizzle. Each table had a large umbrella over it and the tables were close enough together that the patio itself was actually pretty dry. The temperature was still warm and eventually the rain cleared up all together so we ended up having a nice dinner and a good evening. The service was wonderful, the food was delicious, the wine helped us laugh about the kitchen flood, and we were out of the stinky house long enough for it to dry out.

In summary: No further plumbing issues to date and I highly recommend Onesta. I call Romantic Date Night a success.