A Crack in the Stack, then Craic Out Back

This day began as, to use the vernacular vulgate, an ass day. I had a slow drip of water into my apartment which turned out to be from a crack in the stack pipe, the large drainage pipe for the building, in the apartment upstairs from mine. This problem was diagnosed last week, a call to the landlady that there was a drip of water through my ceiling and mold in the basement laundry room ceiling had led to a call to a plumber. At 9AM on my day off, I had to be up to open up my apartment for the plumbers who would be knocking holes in my wall and ceiling to access the faulty pipe. Thankfully, what was supposed to be a five or six hour job ended up being a two hour job, so having the water shut off was no big deal. I spent the morning shooting the breeze with my landlady, a nice lady to be sure.

This evening, my upstairs neighbor and I went to our nextdoor neighbor's house for drinks and a light dinner on the backyard deck. He's a Westmeath man who has been living in Yonkers for twenty years, after a stint in London. My upstairs neighbor's ex came by, and I learned (after a couple of years) that he and my nextdoor neighbor had known each other for years, ever since my nextdoor neighbor worked in a video store (this will tell you how long ago this was) in Cavan which my upstairs neighbor's ex used to patronize when he was a boy. It was funny to hear them relate old anecdotes about people and places they'd known in common, including an uproarious story about a nefarious cross-border smuggler going to the video store to rent a movie, any movie, and getting handed a movie in about a minute, then when the gardai showed up the next day to interrogate my neighbor, getting a story about how the nefarious smuggler had dithered over what movie to order for at least half an hour... a few weeks later, the nefarious smuggler was offering my neighbor a thirty inch TV gratis.

The beer flowed, and I had brought a bottle of my homemade rocket-fuel strength limoncello. It was a hilarious, boozy night, but one which turned serious as we talked about family in those stretches between jokes. We all have similar values, and family was a common thread throughout the hours of conversation. As I noted, the day started off as an ass day, with a crack in the stack, but it ended up as a class day with craic out back.