We got home from the annual U.S. Embassy Marine Ball a little before midnight, Saturday night. When I opened the front door we heard what sounded like Niagara Falls in our bedroom. One of the pipes going to the sink in the master bathroom had broken upstream of the sink cutoff valve. The bathroom was under about a half inch of water and the large area rug in the bedroom had absorbed an amazing amount of water.

This is where I need to mention that we have two basements, one called the basement and one called the bilge. The "basement" side is a normal (ok, it's in Central Asia, so it's far from normal) basement. Our freezer is down there and there's a very nice room with wooden shelving lining the walls that makes for wonderful storage. That room has a split-pack HVAC unit and can be kept incredibly dry. We hope that someday it returns to a dry state (dry state as in humidity, not as in Mississippi), but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The other basement, or "bilge" is accessed off of the laundry room. The laundry room is attached to one end of the house but to get to it you have to go out the front door, down one side of the courtyard, and up a flight of steps. In the laundry room floor is a heavy steel door/hatch. The hatch opens --with no small amount of upper body strength-- to reveal a steeply pitched, ladder type stair like one would find in the lower reaches of a large ship. This other basement, or bilge as we call it to keep it straight from the "normal" basement, is where all the mechanical stuff is located and a dark, filthy maze of pipes, boilers, tanks, wires and electrical boxes. It's a mildly frightening place and Melanie all but refuses to go down there.

So, as Melanie is running around the bedroom and bath with her full-length gown pulled up around her knees trying to mitigate the ever rising waters, I'm climbing down into the bilge in black tie. I remember thinking at the time that I'm way overdressed and that this would be funny if it was happening to someone else.

I'm sure everyone has experienced a household flood at some point, so I won't go into the boring details. I got the water shut off, the water was mopped up, and Sunday was pissed away drying out the bedroom rug. Oh, I did forget to mention the other exciting aspect of our little domestic disaster. Sitting on the floor next to the offending sink is a 220/110V step-down transformer/power regulator unit, like many things, about the size of a bread box. I'm glad that I was the first one into the flooded bathroom and I'm glad that my opera pumps have leather soles.

Is it wrong that a man actually owns a pair of opera pumps? I only ask because worrying about this out loud makes the fact that I do own them seem less gay, but I digress.

Sunday night, we discovered the heretofore normal and dry basement area under one to two inches of water as a result of the bathroom flood. The water on the basement floor would have been deeper had much of it not been absorbed by the 50 moving boxes and hundred-plus pounds of packing paper we saved from our move out here.

Melanie was told that the packing materials that will be used by the local moving contractor upon our departure are for crap. Since we had that nice, dry space, it seemed like a good idea to save as much of the good quality, stateside packing material as we could. I spent weeks (yes, weeks!) carefully flattening out sheets of packing paper on the dining room table as I unpacked the moving boxes. The embassy sanitation crew hauled away the sodden mess on Tuesday and a lessor man would have cried.

We haven't done anything particularly exotic lately (beyond living in Central Asia). We did take a leaf drive up north of Dushanbe through the Varzov Valley a few weeks ago. Here and there we found some fall color in the occasional small stands of trees in spots where the river widens out of its moonscape gorge a bit. We then took a turn off the main highway (two lane blacktop) on to a more-or-less dirt road that supposedly leads to the village of Takob, home of the one-and-only ski area in Tajikistan. The road meandered through tiny, forgotten villages and the ruins of Soviet industry. When we got up to about the 6,000 foot level, the road became something more like a donkey track and Melanie started pitching a fit. Convinced we must have missed a turn and having less than half a tank of gas, she made me turn around at what we think is the village of Safidorak. A village so remote that -according to the guidebook- the villagers speak Sogdian, an almost dead form of early Farsi, once the lingua franca of the Silk Road. Not exactly the Sunday drive to grandma's. We never did find the ski area.