Hello from the Land of 10,000 Lakes! I’m on vacation in Minnesota this week, and while I hope to pop in periodically, I’ll mostly be attempting to move my most viewed posts from my old blog to here. Hope you enjoy the trip down memory lane!
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This post was originally published on July 1, 2011. Which means today is the 1 year anniversary of the Shit Tsunami. How special.

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Whoever said that if you can make it to hump day it’s smooth sailing the rest of the week, lied.

The rest of the week sucks. It sucks worse than the beginning of the week.

Wednesday at 4:45 the Boyfriend was laid off from the job he landed 3.5 WEEKS AGO. Ever been hired and let go in the same month? No? That’s cuz it’s bad business, people! It’s a shitty thing to do, wouldn’t you agree?

Speaking of shit, my bathroom is full of it. Ready for story #2? This one you can laugh at. Lord knows I am.

This morning I decided it was probably time to shave my legs being that I’ve been mistaken for a Yeti twice this week. So I’m shaving my legs, not totally paying attention, and I realize the drain is not…draining. So I think, Oh geez, I better hurry up, must have a clog. My shower is one of those walk-ins–not a deep tub–and my bathroom has carpet, not tile, so I really didn’t want it to overflow.

So I’m hurrying and that water is NOT going down. Suddenly I feel COLD on my feet. Not because the water is cooling off, but because MY SHOWER IS BACKING UP. It’s not just for toilets anymore, folks. So I turn the shower off and wait and nothing happens so I’m like, Well I’m staying outta there but I’ll shampoo my hair super quick and just stick my head under the spout. So, standing soaking wet on the carpet I turn the faucet back on speedy quick to rinse my head AND THE DRAIN POPS OFF AND SHIT STARTS COMING OUT. I turn the thing off, covered in soap, grab a towel and run to tell my dad who is working out right outside my bathroom door that it’s bad news bears up in here. He’ll come check it out in a sec.

So I go upstairs and finish showering and everything is fine so I’m thinking we have a big-ass clog and I’m just the lucky one who caused it. I get back downstairs after Shower Part 2 upstairs and enter my bathroom to find that my shower is, in fact, overflowing shit onto the carpet.

And it smells really great.

I grab a bucket and start taking the “water” (I use this term loosely as it didn’t look or smell like water) from the shower and pour it down my sink. Not down my toilet because now that’s clogged. I don’t know how. Life is great.

My dad comes in after realizing the severity of the situation and grabs another bucket to help. He also miraculously gets the toilet to flush. After about five minutes of making NO headway, we realize the water we are dumping into the sink and toilet is just coming back up into the shower. This is about the time the shower starts to look reeeeeeeeeal nasty.

My dad finds an old garbage can in the garage and a huge pail and starts filling it with water until we get the situation under control. We carry the eleven billion gallons of water up 13 steep stairs to dump it out outside and inform my mother that while she has been getting ready there has been a shit tsunami in the basement.

This is all before 7 a.m. Good morning to me.

The plumber, AKA my new boyfriend is epic and at my house before 7. I didn’t see his face, but I think he probably looked like Jesus. He informed us that we didn’t have a clog, we had a full septic tank. AKA, Maddie didn’t do it.

But now we can’t flush anything or use the sinks until it’s drained, which could be as late as tomorrow…but we leave on vacation today. If you’re a glass-half-full gal that’s great because you don’t want to live in a shit house for a day. If you’re a glass-half-empty gal it sucks because you will come home to a house of three-day-old rotting shit. Take it for what it’s worth.

The bright side to all of this is at 5 o’clock I’m on vacation for a week. Peace out, SoDak. Peace out, shit tsunami.

Despite my smelly morning, this did bring me some clarity. I’m a firm believer in everything happens for reason, but sometimes it’s really hard to remember that. You can only hear “Things will get better, they always do!” so many times before you’re like “WHERE IS THE BETTER!? I DON’T SEE IT!!” But everything DOES happen for a reason.

Proof?

I’m late for everything. If this would have happened on a normal morning, I would have been showering at 7 a.m. and this disaster would have lasted until 8 and I would have been super late for work. However, today I woke up at 6. I don’t know why. I had some last minute packing to do, but it wouldn’t have taken me that long.

I think I woke up at 6 and showered so early because God was saying, You better wake up early today, Maddie. There is a shit tsunami coming and if you are your usual running-late self you will be fired for tardiness.

OK maybe He didn’t say that EXACTLY. But I do think that’s what happened. So I have to believe that even though the Boyfriend losing his job is a giant suck-fest, it happened for a reason. All is not lost. Other people have had it way worse.

As soon as I know “the reason,” I’ll be sure to let you all know.

I just hope it’s not because the Boyfriend is about to experience his own shit tsunami.