Water can be terrifying

Yesterday, crews came around to our community to power wash all the houses.

I’ll leave you to process the nuances of that statement, but those are the facts and we must live with them.  A notice was slipped in our door last Friday night, alerting us to the fact that, at some point this week, dudes with hoses would be blasting our houses with a high-pressure stream of water, and could we please take anything breakable off our patios so it didn’t end up lodged in our neighbour’s wall.  For us, this meant hauling our potted plants and patio furniture into the living room, where they sat gazing out through the sliding doors and waiting for the crews to arrive and finish their work.

Around 10 o’clock yesterday morning, I sat at my desk in my office upstairs.  I had the blinds half-drawn, as the sun was making it a little hard to see my monitor, and so I didn’t really have a good view of what was going on outside.  The house was quiet, the street was quiet, and then an enormous jet of violently angry water suddenly pounded the window inches from my face.  A window, when hit with a stream of liquid like that, behaves much like a drum, and my entire office was its acoustic chamber.  I almost crapped my pants.

The crews quickly finished our house and moved on to the next, but by then the irrevocable damage to my psyche was done.  I now sit fretfully at my desk, peering nervously out to the street and starting in alarm whenever someone in the house turns on a tap.

photo credit: Pembroke Dave