One crazy day

In reality, this post covers more than just a single day.  However, the drama can all be traced back to a single day of our life in Rome, one 20 October 2011.

It was raining that morning when my alarm went off.  It has rained very little in our 7 weeks living in this city (although that will be changing soon...November and December are RAINY).  So when I heard the rain hitting the scaffolding outside our bedroom window (have I talked about that?  It's been there for weeks....they are using our terrace to hold a good chunk of it), and the occasional thunder, I kept hitting my snooze.  It felt so nice to doze and listen to a good thunderstorm, one that would fit in well in Missouri, not any of the last three cities I've lived in.  Colby was snuggling with me, like he does in the morning, and I was happy to postpone my day at the Vatican Secret Archives.  I'll just get there a little later, I can still apply for my tessera at 9:30 instead of 9:00.

Finally, I pulled myself out of bed.  Colby stayed on my pillow.  I climbed out of bed in the dark, since Nick was still sleeping, and soon noticed that I'd stepped in something wet.

Great, I thought, I found some cat puke.

Step number two quickly revealed that, in fact, the whole floor was wet.  What was going on??

I wake Nick up and tell him I need to turn on the light because the floor is wet.  As soon as I do, I see our entire floor covered in water!  Everywhere, there's at least half an inch, and I'm soon to discover more in other parts of the apartment.

I look back by the bed, and see Colby now sitting on the floor in one of the only dry spots left.  How on earth did he find that??

As I walk through the apartment, with my yoga pants hiked up, I discover water pretty much everywhere.  And, I'm starting to hear voices in the hallway.  It turns out that the water has leaked under our door!!  I make myself presentable as quickly as possible and open it.  Turns out, ours wasn't the only apartment flooded.  Also, can I just say here that my Italian vocabulary regarding flooding is seriously wanting?  And, such stress renders me unable to understand a word of it.

We do live on the lowest level of our building, but we're built into a hillside.  What on earth is going on??

Remember that scaffolding?  Turns out that the debris from the construction work has never been cleaned from our terrace and has clogged the drain.  That terrace is just outside the door in the above photo.

We rescued the kitties very early on and let them use the bed as an island:

Now, there are positives and negatives of having a stone floor.  Positives include no water damage!  Negatives include the fact that it is cold and that even "drying" the floor means that it is still somewhat wet until it air dries.

After we get the place mostly cleaned up, Nick and I finally sat down to have some coffee and some breakfast.  Then, Nick tells me a story about how the floor was not wet at 5:30 am.  He knows this because he woke up to the sound of a cat gagging, as if the cat is about to throw up.  He finds Colby, that demonic orange kitty from the above photo, in the process of eating a ribbon.  Similar to curling ribbon, these nearly meter long ribbons come with the garbage bags in Italy.  So, Nick saw it happening and tried to pull it out of his mouth.  He only got a few inches worth....and thus our cat ate a huge, huge piece of ribbon.

I do not react to this well.  I demand to know why didn't he wake me up??  Didn't he know that was dangerous??  Cats can't eat things like that!  Nick tries to get me to calm down, telling me that surely it will be fine.  I tell him I'm 90% sure it is not fine.....

After we clean up a bit more, I turned to Dr. Google (oh, did I mention that a good portion of our clean up happened in the dark because the circuit kept flipping?) and realized that I was RIGHT!!

Stay tuned for the rest of the story......this is getting way too long!