I didn't go to Church.

Catholics are supposed to attend Mass every Sunday. However, we're lazy Catholics. If we make it to Church once a month, we consider that a good thing. We definitely go on Christmas and Easter. If you only go to Mass twice a year, make sure you go on those days.

We have no choice on Christmas -- we're always with Family. Family goes, we go. Easter is more or less up to us. We go. We like going to Mass. We were planning on going.

Then our ceiling caved in.

Two or three weeks ago, I was cleaning in the kitchen when I heard a strange noise. It sounded a bit like a shallow stream trickling over some rocks. Then I realized that it was coming from our living room, a room that doesn't have any water in it. That day, it did. For there, above our television set (aka "our baby") was a cascade of water. Luckily, it was only hitting the thirty-six inch screen and not the vents, circuitry, and other "don't pour water on this part of your television else it explodes" parts of our television. Unluckily, it turned out that the kid upstairs had overflowed the toilet.

Ew, indeed.

So that's what was coming down in the ceiling where we could spy a strip of painted-over tape between two ceiling panels. It stopped after a minute or two. Aside from the cleanup, that was that.

On Good Friday, I left work early. Good thing too, because at about the time when we were usually On The Bus Coming Home, another leak happened. Unlike before, the leak wasn't over the television set, but rather on the far left end of that strip of tape. "PAFP PAFP PAFP," the water said as it hit the carpet. Having used it only two weeks afore, I knew where the pail was.

We collected about a half cup of water that day. (It stopped about five minutes later.) I contacted my landlord and they told me to poke the tape with a screwdriver to relieve the water pressure that's probably building up behind the ceiling panel. I did so warily, hoping that this wasn't toilet water.

Of course, it's Easter Weekend, so there's nobody available to fix the leak. They'll send someone out on Monday.

The upstairs neighbors are psychic. They can tell exactly when my wife is about to take a shower. Just when my wife is about to get into the shower or just when she says, "I think I'll take a shower now," we hear one of the two upstairs showers start up. Or a toilet flush. Or a sink run. Our house has one cold water line in, but four hot water lines. This means if someone takes a shower or flushes a toilet while we're in the shower, all our cold water goes away.

So on Easter morning when my wife was about to take her shower, she had an excuse to say a very bad word.

Two minutes later, the ceiling caved in.

A gush of water came pouring in through Good Friday's Hole. (When I say "gush", I mean about two or three cups.) We called the landlords. They came over a bit later and cut a HUGE hole in our ceiling. Our landlord had to peer through the hole to examine the space between floors. He looked pretty funny with his head stuck in our ceiling.

The upstairs neighbor in the back had a slow leak in her shower, but the leak was behind the wall. Over the last few months, the insulation soaked up more and more water and finally it reached the saturation point on Good Friday. Let me tell you one thing -- water-soaked home insulation is HEAVY.

So we spent all Easter re-arranging our living room.

The bookcase moved here, the futon moved there, the entertainment center moved over there. The computer center had to travel across the room. We had to re-wire our speakers and re-connect our interior phone lines and re-hook up the computer and managed to do this without getting a divorce*. It took about six hours to move, clean, re-assemble, and re-hook up everything.

Tuesday, the contractor came out and fixed the upstairs apartment. Today, he's in our house working on our ceiling. I think my wife said that it's going to take about two or three days to fix the ceiling. Great.

-Faux "we did get to see Sunday's Sopranos, so at least one good thing happened." Pas


* The wife and I cannot hook up electronic equipment without getting into a resentment/indignation match. If we were cartoon characters, our faces would be red and steam would be coming out of our ears. We've since learned to let only one of us tackle a big electronic equipment hookup while the other one goes into another room, preferably a room in another house.