Not exactly what I had planned for tonight

Of all the times to spring a leak, 11 p.m. is not the time to have one. So picture this....

Jimmy walked into our bathroom and opened the cabinet under the sink only to find everything water-soaked. We both immediately blamed Petey our tomcat because he loves to tip glasses of water over if he finds one and sometimes one of us leaves a plastic glass of water in the sink for Princess to drink fresh water out of.

So here we are, at 11 p.m., cleaning out everything under the bathroom sink. I didn't know that you could cram so many old empty and half full plastic bottles in one place, but I think we broke the record. I even found Jimmy's ex-wife's tooth brush under there and Jimmy asked me how I knew it was her's. That was easy, it had written right on it, "Pat's toothbrush," and if I'd known it was there I would have used it to clean around the toilet. (I know I'm being naughty).

As we pulled out the wet stuff it became clear that the leak wasn't Petey's fault after all. Jimmy must have hit or moved something under there because now we had a nice even spray of water, just what we wanted to see this late at night. Luckily there was a turnoff knob under there and when Jimmy twisted it, it did little to stop the leak. Clearly this knob wasn't the right knob for this particular pipe, so Jimmy headed for the spider infested dark crawl space to shut off the main valve coming to the house. This shut off most, I say most of the water, but there was still a little water getting through and the leak needed to be stopped for tonight until it could be fixed in the morning.

So now I'm in the front yard at midnight holding a flashlight over the water meter. The water meter is about 3 feet under ground and the hole over the meter is filled with water so the water has to be dipped out with a plastic bucket and since we couldn't find a plastic bucket at midnight we cut the top off a gallon plastic jug of milk and dipped the water out and then we found mud covering the meter. Once the mud was removed the hole filled with water again and had to be dipped out again. We have lots of ground water around here and we've had lots of rain.

Then the fun began....

trying to turn the lever with an adjustable wrench and a pipe wrench under water with no visibility. After finally, and not easily nor quickly, getting the lever turned WAS NOT EASY so we both agreed that one of those water meter turn-off tools should be our next purchase because we seem to spend a lot of time meeting at the water meter at midnight.

So our water is totally shut off to the house until we call for help tomorrow morning. Jimmy is going to fix the leak under the bathroom sink himself and let the plumbers fix the leak in the crawl space, cause who wants to go under there with all those nasty spiders....it gives me the creeps just thinkin of them.

So this is how we spent our night.