Kage Baker was wont to describe days like this as “clusterfucks.” I have been dealing with many small but ghastly domestic disasters, which is why this is so late and brief.

The temperature at my house today got to 102 degrees. Cars were crashing and catching fire all over the freeways. Surface streets were crammed, craaaammed with cars fleeing the smoke and flames on the roads around (badly named) Elysian Heights.

The trash collectors accidentally carried one of our trash cans a block away. The power is flickering on and off, as every air conditioner in the Los Angeles Basin gets turned on at the same time. And the plumbers, through a pure (but purely horrible) accident, got a pipe liner stuck in our connection to the city sewer, and have so far been unable to remove it even with a tow rope attached to the back of the sump truck …

So we had no running water today. I couldn’t do laundry (which I’d put off in a fit of laziness yestreday) or dishes (ditto). To give honor where it’s due, we  do at least now have a working bathroom: because the noble plumbers worked until 8 PM – with floodlights and shovels and archeological-looking snake-mounted camera displays – to get the pipe at least open.

They’ll be back tomorrow to try and get the damned liner out. I don’t know what with – the rope they ran through an electric windlass and looped around a 3-story tall cypress tree this evening for leverage snapped in half … in the meantime, though, the toilet works.

We are asked not to shower lengthily -so it’s sponge baths in this heat – but we do have a working loo. And believe me, I am grateful. I shall sleep better tonight knowing I don’t have to venture out to find a privy in the dark, especially since there’s a 6-foot deep hole in the yard. I think a raccoon fell in a while ago, but you know what? The fuzzy beasties are on their own out there.

But I wish we could have called the Ghost Hunters.