The soup of filth suffused the tincture of the basement

I can't say that I like the smell of bleach any better than the smell of raw sewage. On the other hand, bleach will kill off the germs from the raw sewage, so in that sense it's preferable. If you haven't figured it out yet, my sewer line backed up. Into the basement. If I'd realized that's what was happening on Friday night, I could have saved myself from the mess getting any worse. But, no, at the time I thought the downstairs toilet was leaking. So I turned off its water supply and figured I'd call someone on Monday. Then Sunday night I ran a load of laundry. Big big BIG mess. Yup. I called someone on Monday, all right. Roto Rooter. Right after I got done teaching.

It took them a while to get anything done. First they tried running their wire thing through an access port on the roof, but it couldn't make the corner at the bottom that takes the line out to the alley. Then they spent about ten minutes trying to come up with an alternative, since my house wasn't built with any convenient sewer line accesses. Finally they decided to try pulling up the downstairs toilet and running the snake through there. It worked. So my drains are now working, and I just ran a load of towels (extra heavy on the bleach, since they'd been sitting on the floor to soak up the water) without flooding anything.

One minor oddity: if not for the mess on Friday night, I might not have seen the e-mail from Mark about Don until after attempting to go to taiji class. It had gotten shunted into junkmail, and I didn't check that on Friday. I don't normally check mail on Saturday morning, but I was planning to e-mail my mom and see if she'd call a plumber for me while I was at class. Then Mark's e-mail sort of shoved that entire thought out of my head.

Teaching? Well, we finished Chapter 3 (graphs) in Stats, played with the graphing calculator in Algebra, and factored trinomials of the form Ax^2+Bx+C in pre-algebra. And I didn't eat much until evening, whereupon the Thai iced tea from Chang's actually made me sleepier rather than more alert.

Oh yes. I needed something to halfway pay attention to whilst grading this semester, so I bought Season 1 of Xena. I had seen some episodes from later seasons... The weirdest thing is that the ones I've seen so far remind me of early episodes of Stargate, SG1. I haven't checked to see if any of the same people were involved.