(NOT) Almost Homeless, Thanks Mother Nature
Pouring rain has caught up with me.
(2025-03-22-0232 OK, maybe not averted. I’m still awake, hanging out in the dining room while my room gets another ozone treatment. Earlier I soaked the problem corner with bleach and put trash bags over it. I am not sure if this other space is going to open up, and this is literally sapping my will to live. A portion of the trouble is pollen, this is my first spring this close to the Bay Area, different plants than the Central Valley.)
(2025-03-20-1847 Disaster averted. The theoretical slow slide pipe breakage is hopefully just theoretical - it responded well to the big drain drill gadget. And we have this three gallon degreaser that’ll be nightly ritual. A little trash bag tent over the affected corner of my room, I turn the UV on whenever I think to, turn it off when I can smell it. I am still on my way out the door, this room has been due for attention for a while, but I’m walking out, not running … )
(2025-03-20-1213 I appropriated the warming light from our chicken coop, installed my 25 watt UV bulb, made a little ozone tent. Prayers to the god of intense oxidization would be gratefully accepted at this time.)
This is my shower, that is my bedroom. The rain has come at us the last few days, hard rain, in soaking Midwestern style torrents. Homes here are on slabs, concrete over the plumbing, and it looks like ours has been moving. We recently replaced the toilet, it had a corrosion leak between reservoir and bowl, during which we got a look at the frightful state of the Korean War era plumbing. The shower previously backed up like this a month or so ago, and the first cure for this in California, bizarrely, is to rent a heavy duty battery powered 50’ sewer snake, get up on the roof, and ream out a couple plumbing system vents.
But now the shower is now backed up again, it’s way worse, and I’ve got water in a corner. This has quite unhelpfully triggered a mold outbreak. The brown crumbly stuff there is dried lavender that fell behind the dresser.
So I must pack up and go. This isn’t the end of the world, I’ve been on the hunt for one of those half price studio unicorns, so I had been networking. I’m not getting precisely what I wanted, but there is a postage stamp sized room I can get into as soon as this weekend. This is good, and I think it better positions me to lasso a unicorn later this year.
I bleach bombed that stuff yesterday, a good soaking with a 25% bleach solution. Once that was done I popped in my 25 watt ozone generator bulb and went away for four hours. It’s marginally better, but if I could afford it I’d be off to a hotel for the next two nights.
I think I could get into a decent place for two nights for $250, one in a location that would facilitate me doing a bit of work while there.
You guys were already really good to me last month, I hate to keep asking, but the previous couple months have been tough. This is just one more injury/insult to add to the pile.