Robbie's coming home tomorrow, glory be. Actually, it occurred to me late this evening that if you measure time in bedtimes, as I do, he's technically already home, which was heartening. We've muddled through these last few days fairly well, although the Woolite incident ended up having unforeseen repercussions when, after I mopped the floor, I emptied the mop water into the utility sink, where the dust and assorted detritus the mop picked up from the floor hardened into some sort of sludge in the pipes and now the utility sink is completely blocked. We don't really use that sink for anything other than laundry, but laundry is fairly important, so this isn't any fun. My parents and I tried to plunge it this evening (the utility sink is a triple sink, the point of which escapes me now even more than it did before), and I'd describe the process as positive in terms of family unity, but it was completely negative in terms of actually unclogging the sink. I think I'll be calling the plumber on Monday. In the meantime, I did laundry tonight by draining the water into a bucket and then emptying the bucket into the floor drain (twelve times, not that I'm counting), which gave me a profound if entirely historically inaccurate respect for our pioneer ancestors.

Also, continuing this week's comedy of basement errors, I went downstairs this morning to discover a shattered flowerpot on the basement floor, which I stared at for a while, blankly, the way whoever made the discovery must have stared at the scuba diver in that story about the forest fire, because it had clearly dropped from some height and I couldn't remember elevating a flowerpot at any point in the recent past. For a while there I figured it was the previous owner of the house. I don't believe in ghosts, of course, but her executrix, who otherwise seemed like an entirely rational woman, told us very confidently at the house closing that her spirit was still in the house, which was an odd thing to say to someone who's about to move in, like, were we supposed to spray for that or something? And then we kept finding large underpants in our laundry chute, and then, and I don't think I've told you guys this yet, I was going through some old paperwork this spring and in the middle of our 2004 tax return I found a letter she'd written extending a postdoctoral offer to someone. That last one made me shriek in terror, to be totally honest, but I'd gotten over it until the flowerpot. However, after some reflection I think it fell out of a bag I'd put up on a shelf, which I thought just held cleaning products but which I now vaguely remember also had a flowerpot in it, so I can still go to sleep tonight.

And in other able-to-sleep-tonight news, tonight I watched The Electric Company for the first time since 1980, and I'm pleased to report that I seem to have gotten over my terror of the kid who yells "Hey you guys!" at the beginning. (Fine, I still found him vaguely unsettling, but I didn't need to bury my head in the sofa cushions while sobbing.) Time heals all wounds, as they say. Or maybe they substituted a less scary kid in there.