Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

The other day I was sitting on my bed, messing around on my computer. It was mid-morning . The kids were upstairs playing, the cat was dozing in her usual spot on my comforter. In the corner of my mind, I noticed a sound. Tippity-tap. Tap tap tap. Tap. Tippity-tap. Tap. "What is that sound?" I thought. It kind of sounded like icicles melting and dripping. Only there weren't any icicles outside my window. So I went back to typing. A few seconds later I heard it again. Tippity-tap-tap. TAP. "What IS that?" I wondered more emphatically. I looked around, tilting my head to catch the direction of the sound. Almost on cue, the cat started looking around as well. And then her eyes drifted upward, to the ceiling. That's when I noticed the crack in the ceiling above my bed. That crack that was DRIPPING WATER ONTO MY CEILING FAN!

CRAAAAP! I thought very emphatically this time. OK, I might have actually yelled it out loud. And I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter, only I was pretty sure it wasn't the dancing and prancing of little reindeer hooves.

It wasn't. I was the pouring and gushing of water onto the floor in the upstairs bathroom. And it was an inch deep! One of my lovely children had turned on the sink to play in and had wandered off, leaving it running. And it just happened (I now noticed) to be one of those rare sinks with no hole do-hickey at the back of the sink to let water out when the sink gets too full. So instead of draining out the non-existent hole do-hickey, it had drained out the top of the basin and onto my floor and through the floor onto the ceiling and through the ceiling onto my ceiling fan, and from the ceiling fan down onto my comforter.

I wasn't sure what I should do first...clean up the water or beat my children. I decided that the beatings could wait (although I did a fair amount of shrieking and ranting, just to set the right mood for what was to come) and pulled all the freshly washed and folded towels onto the floor to mop up the mess.

That done, the interrogation began. Daphne, of course, blamed it on Beck. Beck, of course, said it was him because he admits to anything you ask him, even when he wasn't around when it happened. This was one of those cases where I honestly had no idea which one of them it was. So I did the only fair thing I could come up with--I spanked them both. And though I'm not much for physical punishment, when the ruination of the house is the issue at hand, I find it helpful to punctuate your remarks in a more memorable way than the usual screaming and hair pulling (that would be my own in these lesser cases).

After all that, I realized it was nearly 11 and I still hadn't gotten dressed. So I got in the shower. And when I got out and walked into my room, the cat was staring more intently up at the ceiling. And there was a new sound. Tink, spat. Tinkity tink tink, splat splat splat. This would be the sound of a serious amount of liquid RAINING onto my comforter, my laptop, my iPhone, and my house phone, all of which were clustered under the ceiling fan where I'd left them when I ran upstairs.

Luckily, none of them were ruined. I powered them all down and let them air dry, and they all seem fine. My ceiling, however, has seen better days. And my cat has moved her mid-morning nap spot to the floor a few feet away from my bed. Just in case.

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