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Originally uploaded by me.

The Wide World of Sewage!

Jane has already described, far better than I can, the focal events of JANECON '05. Suffice it to say that high water in the river = high water in other places, such as my septic tank. This didn't occur to me at first, which is why Rat Girl--seen at right, exposing her true form--and I undertook to snake the downstairs plumbing on Saturday morning (assuming a dastardly cloggage.) We were makin' with the snakin', with no positive results; a phone call to the plumber resulted in my taking the cover off the septic and revealing that the groundwater level was about 1" below the bottom of my outflow pipe. Any sudden volume of water causes the whole system to back up via the base of the downstairs toilet. Saturday night saw my intrepid houseguests mopping an inch of sewage-tainted water off my downstairs floor. Massive props to Jane, Sarah, and Rat Girl for their uncomplaining fortitude. Without them, JaneCon 2005 would have been TotalCrapCon I.

So two weekends in a row have been hella exciting! JaneCon was a marvelous success, I ran 2 days of Cthulhu for an enthusiastic crowd, madness and mayhem resulting. The weekend before last, I went to Chicago to visit Alex, with Rat Girl and Kitchen Wench in tow. KW had a burning need to visit a chocolatier called Vosges, which has to be seen to be believed. Truffles with wasabi and ginger, anyone? Or balsamic vinegar and cheese? Unreal. KW, being no slouch as a candymaker herself, felt a professional need to acquire numerous samples of Vosges' wares. If you want to see a photo of someone truly happy, go look at this picture. Then we went to the Hello Kitty store, source of the terrifying photo above, and to the Lego store, which was so cool I completely forgot to take any pictures at all. I'm kicking myself, it was totally awesome. Just as KW indulged her passion by buying truffles, RG and I indulged ours by purchasing about 6 different sets of "Orient Adventure" Legos, which will be combined with the sets we already have into one grand Indiana Jones and the Temple of Brightly Colored Plastic Doom panorama! Ooooh. With that to look forward to, septic problems seem a minor inconvenience along the way.