Worst Case Scenario

Remember our not-so-little roof leak? And then the huge waterfall that dumped into our dining room during a dinner party? Well, that’s nothing after last night.

It’s monsoon season in Sri Lanka, which doesn’t mean at all what I thought it would. I thought monsoons would be more, well, monsoon-y. I expected a constant deluge for days on end, the kind of things you see in movies with people sitting and staring out of their thatched roof tropical hut. In reality, it is a total torrential downpour, but it comes and goes, and things return to tropical island sunny in between. Many times, the worst of it seems to come at night, as was the case last night.

All day yesterday, the wind kept picking up. When I was out running errands, I could see the choppy waves and the storm over the ocean. The International Man of Intrigue was scheduled to return from a business trip in the Maldives last night, and I was starting to get a sinking feeling the weather may not hold out for his flight. Luckily, his flight took off only 15 minutes behind schedule, but as the evening wore on, the wind worsened. Our plexiglass skylight, which was the source of our leaks, started banging up and down whenever the wind gusted. I started getting really nervous about it. After all, the two overlapping pieces of plexiglass had never seemed that secure in the first place. And our dining room waterfall? After four visits from the landlady’s henchmen, we’d given up. They kept insisting it was just the gutters needing to be cleaned, even though the embassy’s maintenance man kept telling them there were more problems. In the end, The International Man of Intrigue and I had resigned ourselves to some leaking whenever it rained, as long as it could be caught by a single bucket. By the time I put The Little Explorers to bed, the banging was worsening, and the water was gushing in. I sighed and pulled the dining room table and chairs out of the way and battened down the hatches as best I could.

The International Man of Intrigue finally arrived home from the airport and was also sufficiently impressed and concerned with the banging plexiglass to make me feel like I wasn’t a complete crazy person. He even took a short video to show to facilities maintenance so they could get an idea of the problem. Then, we retired to the family room to relax and catch up on the excitement of the week. He told me about taking water taxis and meeting interesting people. I filled him in on which Little Explorers had snot noses and fevers, leaky bathtubs, and what kind of pizza we ordered for dinner. Oh, yes, it was obvious who’d had the more exciting few days! What happened next was inevitable, I suppose. A particularly loud series of bangs caught our attention. We grabbed a flashlight to check it out, even though we were pretty sure that a large chunk of plexiglass had just ripped off and disappeared into the night. Sure enough. We now had an open air skylight. After a quick call to the embassy maintenance staff to let them know the situation, we turned in for the night. It wasn’t like anyone could show up and replace a giant piece of plexiglass in a windstorm, anyway.

You know how, when you are lying in bed, worst case scenarios and monsters start popping up in your imagination? (Please, Fellow Adventurers, tell me it’s not just me!)Well, as I let my imagination do the thinking, my biggest concern, aside from water damage, flooding, squirrels, mosquitoes, birds, structural damage, or the roof actually collapsing, was the huge breach in security from the hole in the roof. There are monkeys on this island, people. What if monkeys came into the roof? Or ninjas? Ninjas could repel into the hole in the skylight! Or ninja monkeys? Aaaaaaaaagh!

And then I fell asleep. Apparently skylights ripping off and rain coming in sound nothing like children crying, so I had an excellent night’s sleep.

Bright and early this morning, the sun was shining down through the hole in the skylight and everything looked fine. There was surprisingly little water on the floor. A lot of leaves, but surprisingly little water. The best part? No ninja monkeys! The embassy maintenance staff arrived first thing and the henchmen shortly after. The head henchman walked in to assess the damage. He looked up at the skylight and, for the first time ever, was speechless. No blaming it on leaf filled gutters or trying to find a way to pin a leaky roof on the inhabitants (because, yes, I climb up and poke holes in the roof when you’re not around). He simply blinked a few times, muttered two words in Sinhala and walked out. I have been smiling about that every since. The Intrigues: 1, Henchmen: 0! (Okay, really, the current tally is probably The Intrigues: 3, Henchmen: 47, but we won this round, and I think we get extra points for Head Henchman Dude being rendered speechless.)

It’s mid afternoon as I write this, and the skylight is currently being replaced. It looks like I can go to bed free of worry of invading ninjas. I’m not holding out much hope on this keeping the water out, though. I’ll keep you posted, Fellow Adventurers.

Welcome Home Gifts

Thanks for remembering me, even though I’ve been gone for a while. About the time I recovered from the Nepal Nasties, we had our first visitor from the States, and then Arthur Dent came down with some unidentified illness. Regardless, I’m back in the blogsphere and, if I can remember them all, I have lots of good stories for you. Let’s start with our return from Nepal, shall we??

If you recall, I came home from Nepal dreadfully ill. So ill, in fact, that I didn’t find out until after I recovered just how worried The International Man of Intrigue was about my health. Apparently the part where my face started going numb scared him more than it scared me…but thanks to the modern miracle of antibiotics, that’s all a story for another day. The story for today revolves around our return to the Intrigue Compound.

We got back from Nepal sometime in the wee hours of the morning. I was still feeling ten times worse than awful and the hour van ride from the airport was spent with me concentrating on making it home without making the van driver pull over. Rather than stick around and high-five The International Man of Intrigue or the van driver to celebrate my success, I rushed in the house, intent on making it to my own bed and bathroom. I opened the door to the house and just about fell over. At first, I thought the smell was perhaps from the leaky roof. Maybe the dining room lake had mildewed and spread the smell through the house? Then it hit me. That was the smell of dead things. Oh, Grilled Cheesus, that smell was a dead squirrel. I ordered the Little Explorers to stay directly behind me, took a deep breath, and headed upstairs. To my relief, the smell was less overwhelming up there. When I reached the upstairs old-west-shootout-style balcony, I could see why. There was the body, downstairs, behind the dining room table. It was impossible from upstairs to determine the cause of death. At this point, I did what any self respecting mom with three kids and an intestinal parasite would do: I took the kids to their rooms, shut the doors, and got them ready for bed, counting on the fact that my husband was awesome enough to just take care of the disposal of the body. He was is. He did. He assured me the squirrel’s death was accidental, probably caused by either a fall or being trapped downstairs with no way out. I believed him and went to bed.

The next morning dawned bright and way too early and we realized how wrong we were. A squirrel kept running through the house on the rafters. It was tweeting constantly, and I don’t mean #partyattheintrigues. The high pitched noises woke us up and made us immediately suspicious. Was what we assumed had been a horrible accident actually…murder? Had the squirrel been pushed to his death? I just knew CSI:Colombo was going to show up any minute and arrest us for disposing of the body and disrupting the crime scene. How much trouble were we in for cleaning up all the sticks and rocks and other nasty stuff the squirrels had dropped from the ceiling? I asked The International Man of Intrigue how well he’d hidden the body. He said he’d left it on the curb in a plastic bag for the garbage men to pick up. Since the garbage men secretly hate us, I knew the gig was up.

While the cause of death of Mr. Squirrel was never determined, luckily for us, the punishment for tampering with evidence and all the other crimes we committed is sharing our house with squirrels. Since the squirrels have made it clear by their tweets (#movingintotheintrigues) that they’re not going anywhere, I think our punishment is being carried out.

Bangladesh passport stamp? Check.

We just got back from a five day trip to Dhaka. For those of you who aren’t fluent in geography or political history, Dhaka is the capitol of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is almost completely surrounded by India, other than touching a tiny piece of Myanmar (Burma), and, until 1971, was part of Pakistan. It’s a third world country.

There were several high points of our trip. The first was the airport in Delhi, India. The restrooms were clean. In a third world country developing nation, most restrooms are on the shady side of filling station clean, so this was a very pleasant change. There was also a myriad of fast food and other things to eat and buy. We got McDonald's! The International Man of Intrigue had a Chicken Maharaja Mac and I had a spicy veggie burger that was delicious. The Little Explorers were content with chicken nuggets, fries, and a Sprite to share. All that, and still time to catch our flight to Dhaka.

Oh, there was one more bright spot. All the way home from the Colombo airport, I was terrified of unlocking the door and finding who-knows-what going on in our house. I pictured the squirrels building a lakeside resort in the flooded dining room. Nope! The house was dry and squirrel free. I guess they’re good at cleaning up their post-party messes, at least.

The rest of the trip? With the exception of lots of time with our friends, the Madlingers, and bringing back a cooler full of cheddar and jack cheese from the American Embassy’s commissary in Dhaka, it was no fun. Really, it was all that we expected it to be. It definitely lived up to its hype as a third world country. I’m going to need a few days to find the funny in it all, besides the part where Dhaka rhymes with caca. As you know, Fellow Adventurers, a poop joke is always funny.

Monsoon Dinner Theater

Who wants to go to a boring snooze fest of a dinner party and sit around and stare at the other guests, trying to make polite conversation without yawning over dessert? Not the Intrigue Family! We decided to gather up a couple of families with kids and have a casual, kid friendly afternoon and evening at our place. In that regard, we invited a couple of friends over. For the sake of anonymity, how about we call the first family George and Martha Washington, due to their Virginia/D.C. connections? (Yes, I know that D.C. wasn’t the capitol when Washington was POTUS, but it is named after him, so work with me.) The second family, we’ll call The Livingstones since they lived in Africa for a while. We also hosted a friend on leave from attending a school in Pakistan who we’ll call Ed, because…that’s not his name. With a combined half dozen kids, that rounded out the evening’s attendance.

I planned on keeping things simple, which is unusual for me. Stateside, I look at having people over for dinner as having a captive audience to try a new recipe and make a bunch of appetizers. Over here, I seem to have lost my cooking mojo, so I made pasta salad and decided to marinate and grill some chicken breasts. Since we didn’t bring our grill with us, I bought a one time use grill at Arpico Supercenter. That’s also where I did battle at the meat counter for the last of the boneless chicken breasts. Shopping over here is a lot of work, Fellow Adventurers.

Anyway, after we sat around enjoying each others’ company and some frosty adult beverages for a bit, it was time to fire up the grill. That was the first folly in our little dinner party. Once out of the package, it was apparent the thing was thinner than a single use aluminum pan. Hmm. It also included charcoal and “special igniting paper” and looked like it might hold two chicken breasts at a time. We all got a good laugh out of it as I sent The International Man of Intrigue outside to try to light it while I dodged scootering, biking, running and crawling children to get to the kitchen to fire up the oven as a Plan B. It’s a good thing there was a Plan B because the “special igniting paper” on the grill didn’t even light, let alone the charcoal. Into the oven went the chicken.

Thirty minutes later, the chicken was done and it was time to convince the house full of Little Explorers to stop moving for five seconds and at least eat a bite before running off to play again. About that time, it started raining. Good thing we went with Plan B—I don’t want to grill outside in a monsoon! Just as the grown ups started filling their plates, it happened. It started with Mrs. Livingstone and I putting chicken on our plates and saying, “Did you feel that mist coming down from the ceiling?” The next thing we knew, Mr. Livingstone and Mr. Washington had sprung into action, grabbing the “Waterfall Preparedness Kit” aka, buckets, (leftover from this crisis the other night)stacked in the corner and shoving them under the stream of water coming in from the skylight. All the gentlemen got the table and chairs out of the way and got buckets set up while we moved the Little Adventurers upstairs for movies and the grown ups into the family dining room to eat.

This was when the biggest tragedy of the evening struck: The chicken was bone dry. It tasted like sawdust with Italian seasoning on it. Ugh. Never mind that the steady stream from the roof had turned into a deluge, forcing Mr. Washington, Mr. Livingstone, The International Man of Intrigue, and Ed to empty 10 gallon buckets and 16 gallon tubs, lest they overflow and add to the lake forming on the tile floor of the formal dining room. The chicken was dry, people. Dry.

Despite that obstacle, dinner went on and soon enough it was time for dessert. The waterfall in the dining room had even turned back into a small stream. Perfect. Rich people pay big bucks for water features in their houses and we have one that everyone can enjoy over dessert. Then, just as I was brewing coffee and passing out water for tea, the power went out. Total darkness engulfed the house. Luckily, before we could even find flashlights to go out and fire up the generator, it was back on.

Once the power was on and dinner was finished, the Little Explorers all figured out that splashing in the dining room was oh, so much fun. The little Washington boy was even jealous that he didn’t have a waterfall and puddles in his dining room.

After everyone packed up and headed home to deal with their own ceiling drips, I put our Little Explorers to bed while The International Man of Intrigue finished bailing the water on the floor. While we did the dishes, we remarked that, even though it wasn’t your typical dinner party, it sure was funny.

(In all seriousness, as I post this, tornadoes are ripping through my home state of Kansas. I hope all my family and friends are safe and sound and not hosting a dinner party.)

What? You Don't Have A Waterfall In Your Dining Room?

Well, on Monday I was going to write a nice blog post about Easter Sunday here, but instead I ended up updating my Facebook status with this little gem:

“All cycling and scootering in the formal dining room has been immediately suspended due to the current water level. Wake boarding or swimming will replace normal activities until further notice.”

Yes, our house here is big. Bigger than we’ll ever have stateside. The formal dining room holds a table that seats 10, a china hutch and a sideboard and still seems empty. At one point The International Man of Intrigue and I only half jokingly debated taping off a half court basketball court and holding three on three tournaments. Friends have suggested trampolines or a trapeze. The International Man of Intrigue and a friend insisted that with its second story balcony, it was impossible to eat at the table and not imagine an old west style shootout, complete with bad guys being shot and falling over the banister. Instead of turning it into a gymnasium or movie set, we opened it up for the Little Explorers (and just maybe their parents as well) to scooter or bicycle around. Until Monday night, that is.

The reason the formal dining room is so big is that it used to be an open courtyard. It was closed in and a plexiglass skylight was added before we moved in. That skylight has been the least of our worries. We have had the landlady’s “henchmen”, as I like to call them, over here about every other week working on our roof. We had powder post beetles (or more likely, termites) and they kept replacing parts of the ceiling and roof. The whole setup over our heads is sketchy at best. There are a lot of places in the house, especially in the kitchen, where you can see right outside. I guess all those decorators who want to bring nature indoors should come and check out this idea. Our ceilings are all exposed wood beams and really gorgeous, except for the powder post beetles or termites or whatever finds them tasty this week. On the other side of the ceiling, ostensibly protecting us from the elements, is tin sheeting and a bunch of broken terra cotta shingles. That’s all. Really. It looks like this:


Sketchy, huh?

Amazingly, we haven’t had too many problems, except for Monday night. Monsoon season is starting here, and while we’ve had some heavy rains off and on in the past, we’ve had rain every night for almost a week. In the past, we’ve had some leaks, but nothing that couldn’t be mopped up and moved on with. Monday, we got this:



Mind you, that bright red bucket holds about 10 gallons and filled over the halfway mark in a few minutes! I was pulling buckets and storage bins from wherever I could think of and The International Man of Intrigue was bailing, still in his work clothes! We called Facilities emergency number and someone headed out right away. We knew there wouldn’t be much he could do after hours while it was still monsooning outside. Unfortunately when he showed up it was just a guy in a tuk tuk. Not exactly helpful. He assessed the situation and told us he’d get in touch with the landlady so her henchmen could come and fix it. Then he asked if we had any more buckets or a squeegee or anything. Ummm…noooo…that’s why we called you!

Long story short, the henchmen were up on the roof the next day doing a temporary fix that should get us through the extra long weekend—it’s Sri Lanka’s New Year. Now if only they would evict the tropical squirrel/chipmunk that has taken up residence in our family room ceiling. But that, Fellow Adventurers, may be a tale (or tail) for another day.