Ya’ll know how the rest of it goes, right?
The whole weekend I was in Atlin, and half of this week, I was going around with only one earring. It wasn’t on purpose, it’s just that I got interrupted midway through putting my earrings in and haven’t been able to finish the job.
Y’see, I rarely change my earrings. Michael gave me a pair of gold nugget earrings as a wedding gift, and I practically never take them out. But I wore some dangly earrings to the YWIM Garden Party a few weeks back. Friday morning, I was just getting around to putting the gold nuggets back in.
I was in my PJs and for some reason I didn’t have my glasses on and also had not yet put my contacts in. I don’t know why I was putting my earrings in while blind as a bat; my only excuse is that things aren’t always logical in the early hours of morning. I leaned over to get a closer look at the mirror (because I was blind as a bat and have to be within 5 centimetres of the mirror in order to see anything) and in the process dropped the second earring. I didn’t know where it had gone. I didn’t hear the “ping” of the small piece of precious metal hitting the counter or the floor. I decided I’d better wash my hands so that I could put on my contact lenses so that I could look for my earring.
No sooner did I put my hands under the running water when I felt a little scratch at my wrist and heard “ping”.
“Uh-oh”, I thought. I squinted. Things came into a sort of fuzzy focus just as my earring got swept under the sink stopper and down the drain. (If you haven’t figured it out already, the darn thing had fallen into the cuff of my PJs. Before falling into the sink, that is.)
I shut the water off quickly and put in my contact lenses, then went into the bedroom and woke a still-slumbering Michael, telling him what had happened. He got right on the earring rescue mission while I got ready for work.
It might help to have a visual; here’s what our downstairs bathroom looks like. Well, what it looked like before we moved in and piled all our crap onto the counters (because there is no shelving behind that there mirror).
Our bathroom
It’s pretty, isn’t it? It’s also pretty impractical. The bathroom renovation was done by the last owners, shortly before listing the house. I hate having to clean around the raised bowl. I hate that the faucet always comes loose and then we have to crawl under the counters to re-tighten the bolt. I hate that the mechanism for working the drain stopper never works, no matter what we do to it, and the workings of it just get in the way of stuff going down, which means the sink clogs up easily. And I hate that there’s nowhere close to the mirror to keep my toiletries.
Michael opened the doors below the sink to get to the U-Bend and I remembered that when I’d first moved in, there had been a leak, which I’d fixed using plumber’s tape. In order to get the cap off the bottom of the pipe, Michael first had to fight through several layers of sticky material. He managed. No luck finding the earring, though. He fought with more plumber’s tape and took off the whole U-bend. Still no luck. He unscrewed the top of the drain plug and shone a light down the drain. Aha! We could see the little earring, nestled in some truly disgusting drain gunk, totally out of reach. He got a piece of wire and started pulling up a stinkload of grossness, but the earring remained elusive. In fact, we couldn’t see it anymore. Michael figured it must’ve fallen into the side hole where the lever for the plug mechanism comes through. So he loosened all the bolts or whatever seemed necessary and tried lifting the sink up and off the counter. A few counter tiles came up with it. Damn.
After that, he had to get Jade out of bed and start getting ready for our trip to Atlin. And we haven’t gotten back to the rescue mission yet. So there my earring still lies, in an unusable sink with no drain attached. I’ve been washing my hands in the shower stall and brushing my teeth upstairs.
Tim is now suddenly interested in renovating the bathroom. While I would love to get rid of this stupid set-up, we’ve already got a whole lotta renos going on. And Tim’s talking about replacing the entire vanity so we have less counter-space to clutter up. (I don’t think that’s the solution, Tim.) But we’re going to have to fix the sink, anyway, so something has to be done in there.
All this because of one little gold nugget. Oh, and that little thing called gravity.
For the record, I’m not wearing any earrings now.
