It’s after midnight as I write this, and I just finished my fourth cup of coffee. Yes, I know. But it’s been a very stressful day, and in my opinion, I deserve my one and only vice. Some people turn to alcohol. Some turn to recreational drugs. Me? I turn to coffee.

It really started last night when I fell asleep in my recliner and didn’t wake up until nearly 1:30 this morning. Not long afterward, I was awakened by my four-legged “daughter,” who apparently believes that 4 a.m. is the perfect time to start her day. She wanted food, snacks, and water—in that order.

I eventually managed to fall back asleep and didn’t wake up until around 7:30 a.m. That’s late for me since I’m usually up by 5:30 a.m., whether I want to be or not.

I knew I had a doctor’s appointment at 1:30 p.m., and I wanted to get some yard work done before I had to leave. My plan was to change the filament on my 3D printer and start a print job that would take most of the day. After fighting with it for more than an hour, however, I concluded that I had ordered the wrong filament.

Just as I was getting ready to head upstairs and put on my shoes for yard work, I heard water dripping into the garage from above.

I immediately called upstairs to my wife to turn off anything that was using water. She couldn’t hear me, so I ended up opening the garage door and yelling up the stairwell.

The dripping stopped.

After cleaning up some of the water, I made enough room to get a closer look at where the pipes came through the floor. At first glance, it appeared the water wasn’t coming from a pipe leak at all. It seemed to be leaking from around the pipe and coming from somewhere upstairs.

I ran upstairs to check the washing machine. Everything was dry.

Back downstairs.

After studying the direction of the pipes for a moment, I finally realized the leak wasn’t under the laundry room. It was under our bathroom, farther down the hall.

Back upstairs.

I checked under the sink. Dry.

Back downstairs.

At this point, I instructed my wife to start turning on faucets and flushing toilets while I stood downstairs watching for signs of water.

She turned on the faucets.

Nothing.

Then she flushed the toilet.

That’s when I heard, “The water’s not going down!”

A few seconds later came, “It’s about to overflow!”

BINGO!

The toilet had clogged and overflowed. Water was escaping around the base of the toilet and finding its way downstairs through the floor.

I quickly made my way upstairs and managed to get the toilet unclogged before things got much worse.

A couple of quick notes. When I said I was “running” upstairs and downstairs, that was really just a figure of speech. With my foot the way it is, I can’t run anywhere. A more accurate description would be that I was quickly limping from one floor to the other.

By the time we got everything cleaned up, it was time to leave for my doctor’s appointment on the other side of town. The yard work never happened, the 3D printer never got started, and my carefully planned day was officially shot. Apparently, the toilet had other ideas.

The ablation went as planned. I’m sore, which is expected. From what I’ve been told, tomorrow will probably be worse before it gets better. Even so, I can already tell a slight difference in the way I sit and stand.

They say it can take up to three weeks to experience the full effects of the procedure. I’ve been dealing with this pain for more than three months now, so I suppose another three weeks isn’t going to make much difference.

Still, after today, I think I’ve earned that fourth cup of coffee.