May 26, 2012

Happiness found in the flooded basement

Bucharest, May - "Flowers Month", 2012
Yes, my basement is flooded again. 2 years after the last episode, 4 years from moving into the house, Romania has transformed into a monsoon country and, after 2 weeks of insanely rainy "spring", together with a large portion of Bucharest, including metro stations, the land around my house become wet as a swamp. Due to sweet project imperfection and sloppy construction work (despite insane price) 2 years ago we had 10 cm of water in the whole basement, everything was wet and damaged. After 3 months of work and more than 10k euros additionally spent we had redone and insulated the whole space. Futile. Insulation imperfection again, insane heavy rain, and water entered again. Not much, but keeps you working the whole night to prevent from spreading. So, where's the happiness?

Trust me, I found it. See the blue towel in my picture above? That's happiness. 

It was a good evening thought, we had stolen 2 hours and run to cinema to see MIB3 (remarkable good btw, the best of the series) because my mother ensured the water fighting shift. She is incredible hard working in her early 60s, fighting water while taking care of two kids and surviving the nerve crisis of my soon-to-be-adolescent girl. But we got home eventually around 23:00 PM and I took over my water fighting shift. There are tools: towels, plenty of them, buckets, broom, hose and a water pump installed in a pit I had the inspiration to place in one of the basement rooms when building the house.

So here I am, bare feet, squeezing wet towels, sucking up water in the hose to create pressure, carrying full buckets to the pit, the whole nine yards! It is past midnight I had a difficult week, did not slept more than 6 hours / night the whole week, facing a sleepless night and all of the sudden starting to laugh. Cause I realized that the blue towel all wet I was squeezing was a Chelsea branded towel. And my mind starts to wander around thinking about how absurd this is, how Chelsea won the cup last week playing the ugliest football style (has it rain during the match?), how I gave up totally to watching football (after being heavy consumption TV fan). And yet again, how come I have a Chelsea towel in my house on the wet floor. I use to be a Barcelona fan, but Chelsea? WTF?

And then I remembered we bought this ugly cheap towel from Ohrid Lake in Macedonia (water again!), in a memorable trip, when I was preparing to bath into the lake and having nothing with us except our clothes. So I enjoyed those memories and suddenly there, among all wetness and struggle, tired and stressed, I found my inner happiness.

It's 3:16 AM now my friends and my happiness pushed me to share this with you now before going to bed. My mother shift should start at 4:00 AM. Sweet dreams!