Drip…Drip…Drip

By Gordon Hopkins Houses are pretty nifty.They keep you warm when it is cold, and vice versa. They keep you hidden from view when you are taking a shower (which your neighbors really appreciate). When you are inside your house, the bears can’t get to you. (I mean the living in the woods kind of bears, not the Chicago Bears, although now that I think about it, you probably don’t want them to get you, either.) Most importantly, it is a convenient place to keep all your stuff while you are out getting more stuff.Yup, all in all, a house is a great place to love.Owning a house, on the other hand, eh, not so much.So, you folks may recall we got a little rain last week. (Some of you have already figured out where this is going.) After spending much of the day in the rain, covering all the news so I’d have something to put in next week’s paper, I drug myself home, dripping wet.My beloved cats were so happy to see me. They let me know this by demanding, “Feed us now!”So, I didn’t even have the chance to change out of my wet clothes. I stood at the kitchen sink with a can of cat food, two bowls and spoon and began that nightly ritual.As I stood, hunched over the sink, I could feel water dripping from my wet hair onto the back of my neck. I wiped it away.Another drip. I wiped it away.Another drip. I wiped it away.Another drip. I wiped it away.Uh-oh. I looked up and got a splash of dirty water in my eye.Yes, my roof was leaking. More specifically, the skylight in my kitchen was leaking.In theory, skylights are a great idea. In practice, a skylight is really just a hole in your ceiling and that is just asking for trouble. A skylight in a kitchen is especially dumb because letting the noon sun come pouring into the same room as the stove, into the room that you cook in, justs heats up a room that already gets too hot to bear. This is undoubtedly the reason the skylight in my kitchen was covered. Long before I moved in, someone had placed a piece of cloth, like a curtain, to block out the light. It is hardly noticeable as it is the same shade of pink as my kitchen ceiling. (Yes. My kitchen’s ceiling is pink. I didn’t paint it.)Now I have a confession to make. I originally bought this house for my retired mother, well over a decade ago. I’ve lived in the house myself for seven years. Until that wet day last week, I had no idea my kitchen had a skylight.To be fair, I don’t actually look up a whole lot in my house. The ceiling is where the spiders like to hang out and we have an agreement. They don’t look at me and I don’t look at them. It works out for everyone.I put a pot under the leak and went back to feeding my cats. My cats couldn’t eat in the kitchen. They just stood and stared, their heads jerking at every metallic “plink” when a drop hit the pot. So I let them eat in the living room.My point is, that’s the downside of owning a house. The skylight in my kitchen in leaking and I’m going to have to get that fixed, myself. If I was renting, I could just call a landlord or landlady and demand it be fixed. Then the next time it rained, I would call again and demand to know why it hasn’t been fixed yet and then do the same thing the next time it rained, and so on. Frankly, I would much prefer to make endless angry phone calls than actually fix it myself.

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