My house smells like wet carpet. It's not as bad as the house we saw, while looking for houses, that smelled like dead cat and had a backed up toilet.

It's good to maintain perspective.

So I was doing laundry, as I'm prone to do, and Rice and I were upstairs, on our bed, discussing just how bloody tired we were. I've been sick and it had been a busy day. I had just hauled a room full of stuff into the living room to be taken to the local charitable organization, and he hasn't been sleeping well and had just helped some friends move and then hauled said stuff to said local charitable organization. So we were tired and were discussing going to bed early while trying to keep our eyes open. And it was about 5:30.

Avadore came into our room and informed us that LD had seemed to have releaved his bladder on the floor downstairs. I was moderately confused by this, but LD is two and is prone to do odd things, so I got up to check and said to Rice, "Well, come on. This is a two person job." You know, one person to clean up whatever in the world is on the floor and another to wrangle children.

I wasn't kidding.

We got to the head of the stairs and watched as dark patches spread through the carpet at the foot of the stairs.

So, yes. A hose came loose on the washer and allowed water to dump all over the floor. At about 5:30 in the evening, when every rental place in town is closed/closing.

We scrambled to turn off the water and get the coolers and luggage and remaining laundry and my records and sleeping bags out of the laundry/storage room, and then we set about to find a wet vac. Some neighbors finally lent us a two gallong one. I went down to the local store to rent a carpet cleaner to get water out of our carpets.

And no, I still don't know why the drain in the basement didn't work.

At about 8:15 we had gotten all the water we thought we could off the floor and out of the carpet, so we called the insurance company to ask what else we should do. Instead of saying, "Keep going! Keep going!" they opened a claim for us. At about 10:00 a couple of guys with huge fans and dehumidifiers arrived and ripped a portion of my basement apart.

They did say this was one of the best jobs they'd ever seen because we'd cleaned up as much as we did. We minimalized a lot of damage.

Carpet pad is gone, trim is gone, carpet will probably survive.

And my house stinks and is very, very, very loud.

And no, we didn't get to bed early. Rice and I ate dinner at 11.

We are very grateful it wasn't worse, that Avadore mentioned LD's indiscretion when he did, and that we weren't out at dinner or some such.

Avadore is the hero here, I suspect. Nice of him to mention the water, and then he watched his brother and fed him bread for dinner (I added strawberries later because Avadore loves his strawberries) and even changed his diaper when necessary. He also opened the door for her father all eleven times that Rice had to empty the wet vac.

Rice says, "Hi."