Concrete floors---thank goodness! AND a leaking shower connection.

It's a pain in the arse not being one of those 'blokes' who can do----everything. You know the ones on the adverts who proudly strut their stuff, displaying an almost arrogant confidence about how well they can 'fix tings' make repairs to faulty bits and pieces and even contend with a spot of plumbing. Well---I am not one of those dudes. Yeah I can hear you laughing! So when something goes buggered in a house, I am at a loss. I panic, I worry and fall to pieces, wondering how I am going to afford to pay for the said 'breakdown' of a piece of essential home thingy. Shite--I don't even know the names for most of the elements that make up a house. Don't even attempt to get me to correctly label such devices that are needed to fix the misbehaving components of a house that suddenly goes 'bad.' Well something did go bums up in my home. I kept hearing this strange noise, somewhere in the vicinity of the bathroom. My hearing is such that directional identification is nigh on impossible. Hell---when kids call me at school, it sometimes sounds like the voice of God, calling to explain an imagined sin! Eventually---- that is after three days I decided to investigate a little more formally. I listened in great detail and figured out that water was escaping to regions unknown and that potentially---I was in deep poo---well, not quite, but unwanted water ---where it shouldn't be. I called upon my very knowledgeable neighbour---the most excellent man who built my office for an indeed economical and most certainly skilful manner. He quickly concluded that I had a slow leak behind the wall where the shower thingy connected to the water inflow. He set about testing it by doing this and that and we decided that it needed fixing. I took the opportunity to request a more modern type of showering device--you know the ones that slide up and down and can be taken off the wall. Yeah I know---not a very good description. Unfortunately he could not do the job until the following week. In the meantime I have had to live like an inhabitant of a third world city where the water is only available for a few hours a day. For three days now it has been a matter of turning the water off so that the leak does not cause damage to the home. We eventually found out where the escaping water was going---firstly just into the area near the shower, coming up through the tiles, but on the third day it rose again and I saw little patches on the carpet in the hallway. I had blamed Perdy--thinking that she was just excited to see me come home. How very unfair and wrong of me! By now I was starting to think that many thousands of dollars would be needed to fix the damage and issues, something I don't need right now, as I launch the final stage of my book launch. I had a phone call tonight from my incredible neighbour. He is coming in the morning---two days earlier than I had expected---he is going to fix it all. Two more days of wondering what the damage would be, even though I have a concrete floor, was more than enough to keep me awake at night. Please be a simple, job. I shall keep you posted. Damn, I have to turn the water on for a few minutes----nature calls!