STRANGER THAN FICTION: MILDEW AND SEWAGE: THE SCOURGES OF NEW FLORIDIANS

They say bad things come in threes.

I'm waiting for my third. Does that give you any idea what life's been like these days?

The trouble started a couple of weeks ago when rain began to fall. At first I consoled myself by saying that rain in a good thing: It nourishes Mother Earth, it washed the dust off my car and the ducks in the apartment complex seemed to like it.

That was before the sewer backed up.

Everyone has experienced that horrible, punched-in-the-stomach feeling when the potty doesn't cooperate. You flush, you walk over to wash your hands and you notice that the potty's water level is rising instead of falling. In a panic you grab the plunger and start working on what you hope will be a simple problem with a simple solution.

At least that's what I did at the office last week when the toilet started bubbling. Yes, I said bubbling. It was like some sort of science fiction movie where an alien creature makes its way through the plumbing to reach its next victim, except being eaten alive would be preferable to what actually happened.

When the bubbling stopped, I walked back to my office and settled down at my desk. A co-worker happened by. She stood in the doorway pointing to the floor.

"What's THAT?" she asked. It's the kind of question you don't want to hear after a 15-minute battle with a commode.

A big puddle seemed to be making its way from underneath an inner wall. An hour later there was foul-smelling water a half-inch deep in my office.

Ends up the city sewer pipe was broken, allowing in lots of storm water. In addition, a section of it was clogged, so the water had to go somewhere. "Somewhere" ended up being through a drain under the carpet in my office. Nobody knew it was there before.

Surprise!

But sewer problems abound here in the greater Pensacola area. One community sewer system has to put its treated sewer water -- 1.1 million gallons a day of it -- onto a golf course through a sprinkle system. A friend of mine took me out to learn the great game of golf on that course, and we actually felt the mist off one of the sprinklers.

Nothing seemed amiss until we saw a small sign near a tee box. "Reclaimed water in use," it read. I guess "reclaimed water" sounds much better than "former urine-soaked sewer water."

The trouble is that much of this area used to be swampland, like the Sikeston area of Southeast Missouri. There, a huge drainage project cleared the land to allow for farming. Here, a huge drainage project cleared the land to allow addle-brained snowbirds to move here and end up walking around in raw sewage.

All the humidity causes other problems, too, which brings me to the second disaster: Parts of our concrete porch floor were green with some sort of growth. I took care of the problem by spraying some bathroom cleaner on it and rinsing it away. It killed the bushes around our porch, but at least our porch is concrete-colored again, darn it!

A lady I met in the store Friday mentioned the weather -- BIG MISTAKE. By this time I was suffering from that mental illness people get when they don't see the sun for days.

"Do you think this rain will ever stop?" she asked.

I let loose. "No! No, I don't. You know, I moved here from Missouri wanting a better life, and what did it get me? Rain, rain and more cursed rain! Why is it even called 'The Sunshine State'?"

"Well, honey," she said. "I've lived here all my life, and I call it The Mildew State."

I think we're going to be friends.

~Heidi Nieland is a former staff writer for the Southeast Missourian now working in Pensacola, Fla.