So I came home from the grocery store on Saturday in a mad rush to make a foo-foo-chi-chi picnic to take to a foo-foo-chi-chi philharmonic orchestra concert at the Los Angeles Botanical Gardens in Arcadia, which in L.A. traffic might as well have been on Mars.

I had ripped open the bag of foo-foo-chi-chi mixed micro greens and had just thrown a steak into the pan to sear (say what you want about my other domestic skills, I make a mean steak), when I stepped in what was probably only about half an inch of water. The problem is that half inch covered half my kitchen. (If you need to know how level your kitchen floor is, just empty a few gallons of water on it and see where it settles.)

The flood, which in my panic seemed to be ready to lift off Noah’s arc, appeared to be emanating from my fridge. I wrenched open the door to find a very, very heavy drip coming from the half-open nozzle of the two-gallon bottled water tank my husband suckles from. (He has a matching one at work.) I being absolutely addicted to Diet Coke almost never use the reservoir, so having absolved myself of responsibility for this particular disaster, I did what any wife would do. “AUSTIN!!”

That’s it. And don’t think I’m not absurdly proud of my self control. (Of course this control was mostly derived from the knowledge that my husband would never yell at me for flooding the kitchen. He would simply help me clean it up and say it wasn’t really that bad. Clearly he is a good person, and I am a slug. But I’m a slug with some self-control, by god, and I did help him clean up the kitchen.)

So here’s the real problem. It took approximately twenty-seven bath towels to mop up the Great Flood of 2005. And despite having spread them out in the bathroom as best we could, they’re not really drying very well. There simply aren’t that many places in a one-bedroom L.A. apartment to spread out wet towels. The best place, of course, would be the balcony. But the lease agreement to which I am enslaved states very clearly that I shall not, under any circumstances, leave anything as unsightly as towels on my balcony. And because I live in mortal fear of being evicted from the only decent apartment in three counties that I can afford (which means it still – literally – costs twice as much per month as my parents’ mortgage on a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath house with built-in bookshelves and a three-car garage in Missouri), I will keep my unsightly towels to myself.

Imagine the horror if my neighbors were to discover we owned anything as terrible as towels and that, on occasion, they got wet.

(This, by the way, happened on the same day that I drove all the way to Santa Monica only to discover my favorite running track was being used by an actual track team for practice, then drove out again in search of a board game my husband had to have only to discover the toy store had moved, then went to the grocery store to buy frozen mini quiches only to discover they don’t carry them anymore, then there was the flood, then when we got to the chi-chi concert I discovered my favorite white shirt was covered with something resembling automotive engine oil. See, by comparison, your day was really good, right?)