Hot Floor. Hot Damn.

This is my Morale-O-Meter from the last few days. Sigh...it was so good for a minute.

Wednesday I stayed home from work because surprise, surprise...if you drink excessively for four days in a row, have the stress of your parents in town, are graduating from college and running Bay to Breakers you will probably get sick.

I spent the day on the couch and caught up on my TiVo queue and in between I would go and pee and noticed that the floor right in front of my bathroom door was warm. I noticed it but wasn't too surprised because sometimes the kitties lay there and I thought, well maybe it's a hot water pipe or something and haven't ever noticed it before.

Then Thursday morning it seemed that I couldn't pry the cats off that space and felt around and the floor was still warm. Weird!

Then last night I came home around 12:30am from a long night of being out (in every sense of the word) and I immediately noticed my apartment was unusually warm. Huh? I go into the bedroom and put my hand on that spot on the floor and it's warmer than usual. In fact, the wood file cabinet I have near that spot was even warm. Shit.

I panic because I know that something is wrong and I am standing there, feeling miserable, with my kitties and what if I have to get them out of the house? And where is the carrier? And what do I need to grab? And I know that I have to go into the sub basement to see what is wrong. And I don't want to. I almost want to ignore it and to hell with what happens. Shit.

Out the door I go, I unlock the basement door and as soon as it opens billows of steam stream out into the night. Shit. I turn on the light and it seems that my sub basement room is now a sauna. Or more precisely a turkish bath or steam room. The entire room is saturated and the spiderwebs are heavy with water. The hot water heater that is situated under that part of my bedroom/bathroom floor is spewing scalding water all over and looks like it's going to explode. Shit.

I run upstairs and wake up my front neighbor Patty and she is all wha? and huh? and then ohhhh. We hear our landlady's roommate walking around upstairs so I ring his bell and am like Nivi! Help! He puts on clothes (!awesome!) and comes to the basement with me. He is convinced it's just a leak and even tho the insulation is swollen and bloated, says that it's not going to blow. Thing is, we can't find the shut off valve for the water. Shit.

Patty and I decided to call 911. The Fire Department come in about ten minutes in a giant ladder truck, all sleepy and grumpy, and parade into my basement, root around for the valve, find it and shut it off.

The good news? It's not my hot water heater. Mine is across the room unaffected. Bad news? Poor Patty is withouth hot water until the plumber comes to fix it. Oh and now all the floor boards leading into my bathroom are warped.