you know it's going to be a long day when...

...your find your laundry room and basement flooded.

OK - flooded conjures images of wading in water to retrieve priceless belongings and that's not what we have, here. I only sucked up about 8-9 gallons of standing water, but the area under the laundry room is a crawl space and the soil seems to be saturated down there to quite a depth. The fixture behind the washer had been leaking, a slow, steady spray for who knows how long because we were gone most of yesterday, celebrating Father's Day, and got home quite late. I didn't stop the leak until almost 9:00 this morning after the kids started yelling about "a lake in the bathroom!" Catherine thought it was just terrible and told me, "Mom, I think we are going to have to move to a new house." Really, it was mainly an inconvenience, more work than I expected to have to do today, and a pretty good reason to finally buy a dehumidifier and clean the basement.