How Susan ended up with a bad case of tub trauma

I'm a bath person. The soul mate likes showers. For years we had one bathroom, which he, I and our son managed to work around just fine. Yet I dreamed of not having to get up in the middle of the night to traipse from the bedroom, across the landing, down the stairs, through the dining room, through the kitchen, through the front part of the living room, across the hallway and into the bathroom just to answer nature's call. So several years ago we added a dormer to the south side of our Arts and Crafts house to match the one on the north side, and I finally--finally!!--got my very own bathroom. With an old-fashioned claw foot tub that I bought in an antique store and a toilet seat that never goes up unless it's to clean the thing.

Heaven.

The project took nearly three months to construct and the last thing to go in was my tub. The minute our plumber left, I drew myself a bath, grabbed a book, and climbed in.

I'd been lounging there for maybe five minutes when I felt this sort of THUMP against my right shoulder blade. I shot upright, looked around and thought what was that--an earthquake tremor? But nothing else happened, so I relaxed back in my lovely, hot, chest-deep water again.

Then a minute later there was an ominous rumble. I was just thinking "Oh, this can't be good," when the entire bathtub started tipping over onto its side.

Heart thundering, I leaped out in a wave of water to find the front and back claw feet on the right had fallen off. Luckily they tumbled onto their sides and caught the tub at about a 45 degree angle before it could rip all my newly installed plumbing out of the newly tiled floor.

When my husband got home that night he got the three-hundred pound cast iron tub back upright with block and tackle. He ran steel straps from claw foot to claw foot to keep them from ever falling off again, but I insisted that he not only leave the blocks underneath for support, but stay in the room while I took my first post-cataclysmic bath, just to make sure it didn't toss me out on my naked butt again.

Little by little, over the years, he snuck the blocks out from under the tub, but it took about thirty months before I let him remove the last one. That was three or four years ago and. . .so far, so good.

How about you? Bath or shower person? And have you ever had what's supposed to be an inanimate object turn frisky on you?