More Reality on Steroids

Between snooze alarms at about 8:00 this morning, a loud tapping sound suddenly caught my attention. There are a lot of noises here, noises from the hallway, noises from the cats. But this was definitely coming from inside our apartment, and I couldn't imagine what the cats could be doing to make this particular sound. So I got up, walked out of the bedroom, and followed the sound around the corner into the bathroom. Turned on the light, and said, "Oh, no. Oh, gross."

There has always, since we moved in here, been a sort of circular network of cracks in the ceiling just above our toilet, just below where I think the upstairs neighbors' toilet sits. This concerned me vaguely, but there are lots of cracks in our ceiling in other rooms, too, so I shrugged it off. And then, at 8:00 this morning, there was water dripping from the cracks in the bathroom, splashing tap-tap-tap-tap onto the lid of the toilet.

I whipped a cleaning bucket out of the closet and set it on the toilet to catch the drips, which stopped within a minute or two anyway, and called the property manager, who said, "Oh, that's not good," and promised to send someone from maintenance out today. And now I'm imagining a giant hole in my ceiling and huge clouds of mold spores and all of this going on for days and having to lock my cats--one frightened and one combative--in the bedroom for hours and hours on end.

Stay tuned.