Don’t fix the ceiling until the leak is fixed. You’d be a bit madder when the new ceiling work got wrecked by water.
Wow, when I was growing up, “Don’t go there, you’ll fall…through the ceiling!” was a constant parental warning. We lived in an unfinished suburban house that my dad was working on finishing in odd moments. Upstairs there was substantial storage space under the eaves, unfinished but accessible from a couple of doors at the head of the stairs and off the bathroom. It took my dad literally years to get that upstairs finished, and throughout, we were all warned, direfully, in tones of utter horror, “Don’t go in there and step on the pink fuzzy stuff! You’ll…fall right through! Into the downstairs!”
Nice to see somebody finally did. 
My husband did this, knowing the stupid boards weren’t nailed down! I tried to be suitably sympathetic while trying not to laugh my ass off. He scraped up his leg pretty bad, but at least he was wearing jeans instead of shorts!
The weird thing was, he developed this weird blobby thing on his upper thigh. He finally asked a doc about it, and he said that hubby had scraped a bunch of fat cells together.
I’m glad you’re ok!
Oh, about your pics. You can email them from your phone to your email, or someone else’s who knows how to upload them to a share site. If you have that feature, of course.
Mine was almost as bad. The previous owner had made storage space in the attic with particleboard. Well, particleboard degrades with times. I was trying to get some Christmas decorations down and put my left leg through the old particleboard and the sheetrock ceiling of my bedroom.
Thankfully, I did not fall as far as you and my brother was a sheet rocker. We were able to make a good repair.
I really hate particleboard. 
Ouch, ouch, ouch. Glad you weren’t injured more–in body or spirit, Jodi. You are far braver than I. One look at those skinny attic joists was enough to scare me away from even getting near them. Hell, it isn’t like I could stay on the frickin’ balance beam, and that was in junior high.
It could have been worse, though. (Are you sick of these comforting anecdotes yet?) Ages ago, my dad was clearing out some downed trees clogging a small ravine near the house. One fallen tree was alllmooost split through but just wouldn’t quite tumble clear. So dad climbed onto the thick rooted end, figuring that a few bounces would snap rotted wood free.
No, the tree did not fall, and him with it.
There was a hornet’s nest in the tree roots. They didn’t like being jiggled. They expressed this by swarming out the nest, straight up dad’s pants leg. And stinging all the while, of course.
Dad made a noise I’d never heard and haven’t heard since, sort of ran/flew off the tree trunk and up the ravine wall, then tore across the yard stripping his pants off as he ran. He was the most modest, gentlemanly man ever born but he never cared that he stripped off in front of family and gawking neighbors. (Hey, this was back in the late 50s.)
And I did not laugh at your misfortune.
snerk
Jodi, I’m also glad that you weren’t seriously injured. Anyhow, a story like this will last you a lifetime.
If its any consolation, the water damage to the ceiling most likely would have required that you fix the ceiling anyhow. I paid about $350 to replace a water damaged piece of drywall that was that size which was damaged by a leaky roof. I painted the thing myself but that wasn’t all that difficult to do.
I like the anecdotes; they make me feel, well, not less stupid, but less alone in my stupidity. 
Oh I could not have been so fortunate as to break the ceiling where the water damage was. No, I broke the ceiling about five feet away (in a different room), so if you’re right about the water damage needing a drywall replacement, that just means that now I have twice as much of a repair to do. Rats.
Well, at least the brown stains are gone. Or was the fall at a different location? Seriously, two 3" brown stains appeared on the ceiling of my bedroom during the last day-long rain, last week. I must advise the landlord so that he can attend to the leaking roof (and raise my rent). In the meantime, when rain is predicted, I place a plastic wastbasket under the stains just in case, to minimize damage to the wall-to-wall, in case it drips thru. The attic is only a 3-4-foot-high crawl space in which I have never ventured in my two years here. My lease is up next month but moving 6 rooms and a garage full of stuff is such a hassle.
I’m guessing I’ve pulled my share of bonehead moves. I think the worst was when I was going to pull a stump w/ my farm tractor. The bonehead part is when I hooked the chain to the back of the tractor above the axle. So I ease forward until the chain is tight and put the throttle to her. I was looking back at the stump and immediately knew something was wrong. I spun my head around to find I was looking at the sky. I bailed off to the side, but the tractor continued to flip over with the steering wheel coming down on my knee. Luckily there was another guy there and he came running. I told him to shut off the tractor, as it was still running, upside down (it was a diesel) and then he managed to roll the tractor off my leg so I could get free. Within a short while my knee began to hurt like hell. I went to the ER, 20 miles away, where they wouldn’t give me any pain meds. until they Xrayed it, no matter how much I cursed. I was about a week before I could walk again. Nothing broken, but I sure smooshed every thing in there.
Jodi, I promise, you have never stood up to ask a question at a conference and had the entire audience start laughing at you.
But, well, you did fall through your ceiling.
That’s one of the funniest things I’ve read here for a very long time. Jodi, you may have been a dumbass, but your dumbassery has brought worldwide giggles, yucks, and guffaws. Well played.
Just dangle something through the hole – a prosthetic leg, a rocket nose cone, a long braided truss of golden hair – and call it art.
Are you kidding? This is a golden opportunity for a real-life representation of your favourite variant of Ceiling Cat!
Have you ever seen “The Money Pit”? 
YouTube link (Notice minute 3:05 in the clip.)
Since so many have shared their dumbass moments I’ll confess mine.
You know those scenes in movies where some idiot steps on a garden rake and it bonks them on the forehead? I never thought that was possible. I proved myself wrong. Twice. In the space of five minutes. Ended up with a nice red mark on my forehead.
I set off a set of events at about 18:00 tonight. I was moving everybody else’s junk around in the garage so I could actually use it. Everything needs stay off the wet floor. I had a couple planks setting on two supports and one side collapsed down making the plank into a catapult. The tray I had with screws, bolts and pencils, fell down and spilled across the floor. The pencils all have to have broken lead every half inch. You may be saying that’s not too bad. Well, no it’s not. That was on the end that fell. The end that flew into the air had my portable high impact plastic tool case. It didn’t come open in mid flight. What it did was arc into the air and plummet to the cement at which point the case shattered. The little plastic divider compartments shattered. The case hinges broke, and it’s not portable unless I haul it in a duffel bag. I haven’t even considered sorting through the mess. I scraped it all together and put it in the basement. A few other things got hit by flying debris which sent them flying all over.
I opened the closet in the house and tried to get a cassette. The book next to the cassettes, all started to slide and fall. I’ve been having disasters since Monday. Monday every thing I needed was broken and the thing I needed to fix it was broken. The thing to fix the broken fixing thing was broken and so on. It was like the old song There’s A Hole In The Bucket. Tomorrow I should just stay in bed.
Alright, so I was working construction this one summer, but my duties that summer mainly consisted of traffic detail, which is possibly the most boring job on the entire planet (wait, wait, I take it back-- I worked in the ref. dept of my uni library and had to do shelf reading, which is making sure all the books are in the correct LOC order. The only, and I repeat only amusing thing about that job [other than taking breaks to read some of the books-- did you know someone made a reference book containing only rap lyrics? Must have been before the internet. And it had LL Cool J’s classic song “Tina got a big ol’ butt.” (NB, possibly not the actual title, but only a line in the song)] was the discovery that the bibles were filed under the LOC code “BS.” Yeah, turns out someone in the gov’t has a sense of humor after all). On top of being boring, it was hard to stand on blacktop for 10 hours without moving out of a 3 foot radius, and being unable to sit down.
Well, I had my Giant Metal Stop Sign on a Stick[sup]TM[/sup] stuck in the traffic cone next to me, when the wind gusted and it started to fall. It had fallen out of reach of my hand, but hadn’t hit the ground, when I realized I could step on the side of the traffic cone and get it to come back upright. Yes, upright it came, and as it did the wind caused the sign to spin until it was progressing along the path of least resistance (ie with it’s edge traveling parallel to it’s direction vector). So, instead of seeing a giant red STOP[sup]TM[/sup] rushing up to meet me, I see a knife-edge. But only for a moment, and then it connected with my forehead, just under my hardhat.
It didn’t really hurt much, but there was blood, and the foreman wanted to know how it had happened. Yeah, took some ribbing about that one.
I had one of those ultra el cheapo business chairs at my computer. I had it for about four years, and it was looking the worse for wear, and I was expecting it to break. It eventually did the other night when I leaned right back in it, and one of the wheel arms broke off suddenly.
Result? One moment I was just sitting there, and the next I was deposited unceremoniously on my arse on the floor.
Having recovered and picked myself up, I decided to keep using the chair until I could get another one (hey, it still had four wheels), so I figured that if I spun the wheels around so that the missing one was right at the front, I’d be safe. Five minutes after first hitting the deck, the wheels had - unknown to me - spun around so that the missing one was on the right. I leaned over to get something, and…
…on my arse on the floor again. Only this time, I managed to bruise my arm on the computer desk. That, and get a sore arse.
Do things often burst from your ceiling?
She’s apprenticing to become a Time Bandit.