Happy New Year!

So what did you do for New Year's Eve? Shall I recount the events of our New Year's Eve? Lack of vocal response = yes.

So I woke up in Las Vegas. Yes, I remember how I got there. After 14 hours of driving from San Diego and then through Los Angeles to Las Vegas: that's how I got there. It should NOT take that long to make that drive. Thank you, random California traffic. So, I woke up in Las Vegas, had a lovely little breakfast, put Hazel back in the car (again) despite her rather vocal protests and headed up to Provo. Six hours later, we finally got home.

We started unloading essentials from the car (clothes, toiletries, items that would freeze if left there overnight, etc.) and as we checked out the condo, we noticed an unhappy smell. Jacob started checking various things (trash, fridge, garbage disposal, very old Christmas tree) but all of these things smelled just fine once you got close. We concluded that it must be fate that this condo always smells bad and went about our various tasks.

Then Jacob decided to make some dinner. He opened the hall closet where we keep all of the food storage and BAM: we discovered the source of the smell. This hall closet has water spigots in it where a washer would go if we had one. Since we don't, it's a nice space to keep all of our food storage, or so we thought. It seems that at some point while we were gone the last two weeks, a large amount of water was expelled from both the hot and cold spigots, drenching our food storage and leaving a nice quarter inch high puddle in the floor of this closet. So all of the pasta, bags of rice, and bags of flour that were rest on the floor of the closet: nasty, nasty, nasty. A large portion of the cans that were resting on the floor: bottoms completely rusted and some were rusted through and oozing "stuff". It was really gross.

So we spent our New Year's Eve unloading our food storage closet, trying to discover how on earth water came out of these spigots, drying stuff off and deciding what was salvageable. In the end, we probably lost about a quarter of what was in there and a small portion of what was left needs to be eaten sooner rather than later since the cans have some rust on them. The current working theory Jacob has deduced is that the water was turned off to the whole building at some point (there was an old sink by our neighbor's door and the box for a new one) and (according to Jacob's plumber grandfather), this could create some sort of suction that causes the valves on certain spigots that are normally in use (such as those for a washing machine) to break and leak considerably for a short period of time. If you want a more detailed or a more technical (or a probably more correct) explanation, ask Jacob.

After everything that was salvageable was stacked in the front room and the closet was cleaned and Hazel was put to bed, I fell asleep on the couch watching TV and woke up at 12:15 in time to wish Jacob a Happy New Year and drag my tired self to bed. What a random ending to a very fun vacation and a very good year.