How did these adults manage to get this old?

Sometimes you just have to wonder how a person has managed to live as long as they have...

There was a flood in our apartment building a few days ago. Today the water was shut off for most of the morning while they fixed the broken pipes. For several days now, notice that the water would be shut off today has been posted in all the elevators. You can't get into your apartment without using one of these elevators, the doors to the stairs are locked, so unless you are being a hermit, you have been in an elevator and have seen the notices. Even if you haven't read them.

So lets take a count of who didn't know about the water being shut off... a staggering number in the teens, if not more.

The most egregious ignoring of the notices award goes to the dentist. She has an office on the lower level of the building and was in the middle of a dental procedure that requires water when the water was shut off. This is supposed to be a well-educated, literate person who needs to use the elevators to get to and from her car in the parking lot every day and runs her own professional business.

So what is the stupidest thing you can do during a water shut off... kill your children.

We have a pool. The pool is full of water. It is treated daily with bleach and other chemicals. The award for most dangerous stupidity goes to the woman who came down to fill her children's water bottles with water from the pool. She had to be told by other shocked adults in the elevator not to give this water to her children. Just imagine explaining what happened to your children to a person in Emergency at a hospital - this should get you locked up for life-threatening stupidity.

The children of tomorrow have no chance, the adults have doomed them, but how did the adults get to be as old as they have? What did our western society miss? Has wealth and over-abundance made everyone stupid about basic human survival? Has clean running water readily available in a million taps made people forget how precious that is?

Forget the danger of a comet hitting the planet and wiping everyone out... we seem to be doing the job ourselves.

If I had a parrot what would I teach it to say?

An old comedy sketch from a kid's TV show The Electric Company has a plumber knock on a door, a parrot inside the house says "Who is it?" and the plumber says "It's the plumber. I've come to fix the sink." The comedy happens when the plumber is driven to distraction and collapses on the door step because the parrot keeps saying "Who is it?" over and over again and the plumber keeps answering "It's the plumber. I've come to fix the sink." The humans then come home and find the plumber on the door step and ask out loud "Who is this?" and the parrot says "It's the plumber. I've come to fix the sink." Ta-da-dump-bump.

We've just had our 5th flood since we moved into this building 11 years ago. The plumber just left after fixing the faucet in our shower. This is the first time the damage has started in our suite.

This is the also 5th spot that the flood damage has been in! A whole new area of damage has been opened up to us! It even goes out into the hallway outside our front door! It's amazing how an apartment condo building is put together to maximize damage from leaking pipes!

So if I had a parrot, what would I teach it to say? I may go for the "Who is it?" approach, but wouldn't it be so much more fun to teach it to say "It's the plumber. I've come to fix the sink." whenever anyone asked it "Who is it?"

Some people would be confused by the parrot, but others would just have to smile and laugh. That's the best way to deal with floods - I know this from experience.

Will the end of the world come to Australia first?

Early in the morning, we are up and out of bed because we have a flood in our apartment and the disaster people are searching for the cause of the water that has broken out of the pipes and gone onto our floor. So we listen to a bit of the morning news, where they report that Australia has already celebrated the New Year.

So if the world really is going to end - let's see, the latest estimate is on December 21, 2012 - will Australia be gone before we wake up here in Vancouver?

It seems rather anti-climatic to have the world end while we slumber. So will the end of the world be on the morning news? Or will the end hit everyone at once, so the timing will be off for most of the planet?

What if the world ends when it's midnight in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Only the smallest fraction of people on the planet will see the world end at the time it's supposed to end. A bit of a dull end for the doomsday mongers.

Of course, if you look closely at the latest date for the end of the world, it's actually defined as the start of a new cycle. If you are an optimist, it's the start of something - but it's hard to make a compelling movie out of that, nothing blows up and L.A. does not do a swan dive into the ocean. If you are pessimist, not only can you make movies, but books, books, and more books can be written about the impending disaster.

Right now, another flood in our apartment seems much more likely than the whole world ending. Bad plumbing will end the world, mark my words.

Has anyone seen my screwdriver?

We are finally putting our books back into the second bedroom after the flood that made us frantically move them all out 2 months ago. We have a lot of books, so we needed more shelves and this was an appropriate time to add to our collection, so we needed to put together more shelves before beginning the long slow process of re-shelving the books.

The big stumbling block to this plan was a missing screwdriver. It wasn't where it should be, and it doesn't come when called.

Apparently we're not the only ones missing some tools that seem a bit out of reach. The astronauts on the space station have also lost some tools. During a space walk last week a tool bag deftly escaped from astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper. It floated off into the vacuum of space never to be seen again. Except now it's the latest challenge for amateur astronomers.

Find the tool bag. If you have a powerful telescope, an accurate watch, and can point the telescope in the right direction, there are instructions on the web on how to see the escaped tool bag in orbit. See this news article.

Typical humans, anywhere they go they misplace their screwdrivers. No shelves going up in the space station now, they won't be able to grab a good book and a cup of tea and get comfortable.

What's another term for overly ambitious?

Dehumidifying Vancouver

So we have a flood in our apartment building and for the 3rd time, yes, the water is on our floor and in the walls of our apartment. So we have the disaster recovery dudes come in, rip up carpets, drill holes in kitchen cabinet toe kicks, put 3 industrial strength fans in a bedroom and the kitchen. and put a huge dehumidifier in the bedroom. The disaster recovery guys are typically fun guys, they cheerfully rip up your home and warn you to keep the windows closed, or else the dehumidifier won't work - it will "dehumidify Vancouver" before it will take the water out of your room if you leave the window open.

Now there's a term! Dehumidify Vancouver. The mere thought brings to mind many other fun overly ambitious terms like:

* boiling the ocean
* solves all our problems
* hole in one
* self-appraisal
* honest feedback
* getting your ducks in a row
* business intelligence
* help hotline
* herding cats

Is there something trying to escape from the walls of my apartment condominium building?

Maybe I jinxed it. A couple of days ago I wrote about the labyrinth of duct work in my apartment building and the new access doors on the 9th floor. I figured a small Minotaur had moved in because they would feel right at home in the maze. I also talked about the perplexing maze of pipes that run through this building. The noise that comes from these pipes had me thinking there were small versions of mythical sea monsters living in there. And yesterday we had another flood. So maybe we do have monsters and they are having epic battles in our walls.

The flood started on the 9th floor and the water flowed down to a point where the cupboards above the kitchen sink on the 1st floor had a waterfall coming out of them. It took a while for the investigators to find the leak. All of the apartments from the 8th floor down now have holes in their walls. The investigators started looking on the 2nd floor and moved up through all the apartments until they found the source. It was the 9th floor. The floor plan on the 10th floor is different. The amazing mess of piping and duct work on the change-over is the culprit.

So yet again we have holes in our walls, water on the floor, people from our property management company who want to get restorers in here as soon as possible to fix the damage, and an unresponsive Strata Council who will have to pay for it and will delay the entire process for months. Yes, this has happened to us 3 times now, we know how bad the Strata Council is, we are expecting the worst.

But have the monsters managed to escape? Or do they enjoy the pain and frustration of the human inhabitants of this building when we have a flood? If they enjoy floods, an apartment condominium in Vancouver is The Place To Be.