We’ve all had our share of escaping-water emergencies, as well as our share of uncontained vomit calamities. Tonight we had one of the former, caused by the washing machine hose slipping out of the drain pipe. As I discovered this and told Abby, she casually said, “That happens sometimes.”

Grr.

I got the shop-vac from the garage and sucked up all the standing water, then got the carpet shampooer out of the “terrible room” (sidebar: Abby nicknamed it that because it was the dumping ground for all our junk, but recently we’ve been trying fruitlessly to call it the sewing room) and suctioned on the carpet for half an hour. So now while it’s wet to the touch, at least it doesn’t squish out loud when we step on it.

One mistake I made in this semi-comical procedure was that I didn’t empty the shop-vac before I slurped up all the wash-water, so its container created a slurry of water and grit from previously vacuuming our cars, and when I went to dump it in the bathtub, it immediately clogged the drain with a grey substance that looked very much like a prop from a horror movie, possibly titled, “Oklahoma Septic Terror.”