So I'm out last night, feeling good and enjoying some choice conversation with the regular triumvirate (a group which hasn't actually hung out as a single entity for quite some time) at Old Ebbitt Grill. Stories are passed around (some better than others), complex conundrums are batted back and forth, the lyrics to Disney's Gummybears are examined and a good time is had by all. It's almost as if I've never come down from the weekend, as if a continuous streak of good fortune has decided to blow my way. And hey, if lady luck's blowing on your dice, you better keep rolling, right? So we move to a new location, meet up with another person, and keep things going. Eventually, as the evening wore on, one of our party bowed to the pressures of work and headed home. At short amount of time later, the rest of us decide to pack it in and call it a night.

After an uneventful cab ride home, I walk up to the door and see a small note taped on the entry to the dredwerkz. The note says that the water heater has exploded and that rapidly cooling water is now all over the washer/dryer room of the house. Damn. I go inside and find, sure enough, that the hot water heater has apparently rusted from the inside out, reducing its usefulness to zero, and letting water stream out through the opening until the entire hot water is shut down. (Thankfully one of us went home early, right?) After some brief discussion, the body politic elects to call our landlord in the morning (due to the fact that, though technically "morning" already, it's far too early for civilized phone calls) and deal with the problem then.

I didn't really need any hot water that night, and I figured that I'd make do the next morning, and that things weren't actually all that bad. (It's the landlord's problem, right? Not mine!) So the streak, though tempered, didn't appear to have ended.

At six o'clock in the morning, when for some absurd reason my alarm goes off (I really should reset it to the proper time one of these days), I wake up and notice that the house is cold. Really cold. Normally, the dredwerkz is kept at a icy temperature throughout the house, in order to save money. But one of the odd flukes of the building is that if I keep my door closed, the temperature gauge which sits right outside it will stay much colder than my room. The radiator in my room will continue to pump warm energy into the air (aided by a properly placed fan) so that I typically sleep in an environment 15-20 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. If it's sixty degrees in the hall, it's probably 75 degrees in my room. Nice, eh? But this morning was different.

You see, although we were fortunate to have someone arrive early at the house to shut off the flow of water, same said person was slightly confused about how the heating system functioned in our house. Believing that the radiators were tied into the water heater system (as opposed to the gas furnace nearby), this individual shut the heat off for the entire house, thinking he was doing us all a favor. I didn't think to check at the time, but someone else did, placing her hand on a radiator shortly after we arrived home and concluding, incorrectly, that the heat was still on because the radiator was still warm. (In fact, the radiator was probably already beginning to cool down and just hadn't had enough time yet.)

And so, at six in the morning, a scant hour and a half before I'm supposed to wake up, I walked out of my freezing room into the even colder hall to discover that the temperature was below 45 degrees and falling. I immediately turned the heat back on, retreated to my room and attempted to get some fitful rest. By the time I got to sleep, almost an hour later, it was time to wake up again. The house had warmed up only 10 degrees during the duration, to a cozy 55. Nicely, though, my room had gotten much warmer as usual, so things seemed to be looking up.

Not so fast.

After getting up, brushing my teeth and other stuff, it's determined that someone will call the landlord. Helena picks up the phone and calls his number (we'd procured it the night before after finding the flooded room) to ask him to come by and help. She's already agreed to work from home during the day in case things need to be helped along. So after calling the landlord, she speaks to him for a few minutes. I can only hear one side of the conversation, which goes something like this:

"Yes."
"I understand."
"No, I'm really sorry."
"Of course, I understand."
"Well, I'll be here if you get a chance. You have our number."

Thinking that somehow our landlord had made it appear to be our fault, I'm slightly miffed. Then she explains: apparently during the night, while we were out cavorting, our landlord was in his house, enjoying a roaring fire with his family. Just as they're about to call it a night themselves, he notices the smell of burning pine that isn't coming from the fire. Apparently, the old house's chimney has a problem: the fire has escaped from the chimney and caught his office on fire. In minutes, the ceiling is alight and at the end of it all, his entire office has burned down to the ground. So he is a little bit distracted when one of his tenants calls to complain about a burst water heater.

End streak. Right there. Our landlord said he'd try to be up and running again within twenty-four hours. (Although, what he actually does it beyond me, other than make money off of us and others. It's not like he runs an assembly line producing cars or anything.) He hopefully will have time to send someone by to repair our water heater. I wouldn't count on it. If I were in his shoes, we'd be the last people I'd be worrying about. Which is what worries me.

So I drag my tired, cold, improperly cleaned body into work, only to discover that my metro stop entrance into the building has been flooded out. So I'm forced to take another exit and walk through the freezing wind to get to my building. Nail in the coffin. It has to get better from here, right? It can only go up, right?

Absurdly, I'm still in a good mood. It's almost comical, the series of events that have been going on.