Moisture, moisture everywhere
One of the creepiest short stories I have ever read is called "Chac Mool" by Carlos Fuentes (all of his stories are totally creepy; he's like the Stephen King of Mexico). Chac was the god of rain in Mayan mythology and could only be placated through blood sacrifice. In the story, a man decides to buy a stauette of Chac Mool at an outdoor bazaar and then takes it home and leaves it in his basement. After a while he realizes that his house seems damp and is starting to smell weird and then the walls start growing mold and all the dogs and stray cats in the neighborhood start disappearing and other strange stuff. Basically, the god starts taking over this guy's house and the guy tries to escape and can't. It's a better story when you read it.
Our house seems to have been overrun by dampness today and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm getting punished for being unwilling to pray for "moisture". This morning S-Boogie woke up with sopping wet pajamas since her diaper was overflowing. Then, a few hours later I managed to have a drink of water go down the wrong way, coughed really hard, and wet my pants. Yes, I wet my pants. That's what you get for being a woman--raging hormones and poor bladder control. And then the final straw came this afternoon when I went to turn on the lamp next to our couch and realized that the carpet was soaking wet. The weird thing was that it happened while the apartment owner was here installing our new smoke detector. Mr. Fob and I had been noticing water in the track of the window, but were mystified because the rain can't get in thanks to the large overhang out front. Well, the owner went outside and turned on the sprinklers and we discovered the problem. The sprinkler in front is malfunctioning and shooting water directly at our window. We had no idea because the sprinklers only come on at night. I generally close the windows before going to bed, but it's a weird double window and I wasn't closing the outside one, only the inside one. So now we have a big wet carpet spot that needs to dry out, and it happens to be mostly under the couch. And we need to take the windows off their tracks and thoroughly dry everything out because it smells like rotting dead things. So, if anyone out there has been sacrificing small animals to Chac Mool in our name, cut it out! We have more than enough moisture around here.
Our house seems to have been overrun by dampness today and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm getting punished for being unwilling to pray for "moisture". This morning S-Boogie woke up with sopping wet pajamas since her diaper was overflowing. Then, a few hours later I managed to have a drink of water go down the wrong way, coughed really hard, and wet my pants. Yes, I wet my pants. That's what you get for being a woman--raging hormones and poor bladder control. And then the final straw came this afternoon when I went to turn on the lamp next to our couch and realized that the carpet was soaking wet. The weird thing was that it happened while the apartment owner was here installing our new smoke detector. Mr. Fob and I had been noticing water in the track of the window, but were mystified because the rain can't get in thanks to the large overhang out front. Well, the owner went outside and turned on the sprinklers and we discovered the problem. The sprinkler in front is malfunctioning and shooting water directly at our window. We had no idea because the sprinklers only come on at night. I generally close the windows before going to bed, but it's a weird double window and I wasn't closing the outside one, only the inside one. So now we have a big wet carpet spot that needs to dry out, and it happens to be mostly under the couch. And we need to take the windows off their tracks and thoroughly dry everything out because it smells like rotting dead things. So, if anyone out there has been sacrificing small animals to Chac Mool in our name, cut it out! We have more than enough moisture around here.
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