I haven’t been home all weekend. This morning, opening my bedroom door revealed all sorts of white stuff all over my bedroom floor. I first thought it was Dodo playing with something and tearing it up, and then I thought the pieces looked like styrofoam. Uh-oh. Dreadfully, I looked up. A large portion of my popcorn ceiling has become popcorn flooring.

It’s been pouring rain all weekend and I’ve naively enjoyed it, thinking it great for our current California water crisis. Even despite an association member and neighbor’s phone call to me early Sunday morning asking if I had any leaks (and my explaining I wasn’t home to check but that I didn’t think so), it really did not occur to me that I’d have a problem. I ran around upstairs checking other ceilings, looking in closets. I found another leak, a milder one, in the spare bedroom. I padded down the damp areas on the carpet and set up a bucket to catch the rhythmic drippage in my bedroom, drops falling off the ceiling fan. On the drive to work, I called the neighbor who’d called me about his ceiling leak and left a voice mail explaining mine. He was going to call the roofers, he’d told me on Sunday morning.

Despite the small wet disasters going on at home, I see the silver linings around the rainy clouds:
* the leaks did not occur over electronics, paintings, other valuables that would be irreparably damaged.
* I had pre-sorted my laundry before washing, leaving piles on the floor in my bedroom, and the drips occurred over these piles. Two piles of clothes were completely drenched. But this is a fortunate thing, because the two piles were tough workout clothes and not my delicates, AND the fact that they were there kept the water from soaking into my carpet, going through the floor/ceiling and creating another water problem/leak downstairs, possibly onto my big screen TV or something. One ceiling is easier to repair than two. No wonder I hadn’t had the urge to actually DO my laundry after presorting them for the past week. (I’d taken the two waterlogged piles and thrown them in the washing machine and started the cycle before I left for work.)
* As is typical of our schizophrenic California weather, today and the remainder of the week is projected to be dry and ultra-sunny, probably in the low 70s. That’ll give my roof some time to dry off and be repaired.

Mr. W just called and I just told him. He went through a bout of cussing and Chicken Little-esque “the sky is falling” proclamations, about how the space between my roof and my bedroom ceiling is damaged now and how my association better do something and get my roof repaired and reminding me how I had to pay last year for other peoples’ leaks when I didn’t have leaks and about how I’d better keep calling the guy and getting on him (even though I think he’s not answering his home phone because he’s at work), and suddenly I’m feeling a lot more gloomy about the whole situation.

I hope it’s not going to cost me a bundle. I don’t have a bundle of money I can spare right now…