So how was your weekend?

Mine wasn't quite what I expected.

Very early Saturday morning, the lady we're staying with left town for the weekend. We meant to get up early and go work on the fence at the Purple House. We finally got over there at 11. I got a little weeding done, but no fence was constructed and we had one incident while unloading the car of "Look Daddy. [Smash]." As the two year old "helped" carry the dog's water bowl.

We went to a cookout at a friend's and had a lovely lunch followed by a drive down the road a piece to the town my sister-in-law and her family live in. My nine year old niece had decided instead of a lemonade stand to have a craft stand and invited The Boy to participate. I suspect no one will be surprised that the only people who came to shop were their parents, but they were both pleased with the $3 or so they earned -- especially, because I paid with Sacajawea dollars.

Saturday night we got home late, put the kids to bed and were lounging in the living room reading the newspaper and running a load of laundry when the 85 lb., epitome of dumb blonde, yellow lab that lives here came running into the room tracking water everywhere. The laundry room had flooded. We dried the floor and pulled out the washing machine to dry underneath it, where we discovered that the problem was not the machine failing, but a backed up drain pipe.

Upon going down into the basement to see if we could find the problem, we discovered it wasn't hard to find, since water was and had been for some time, spewing all over the basement. I suppose it is a good thing there are twenty-four hour plumbers and by 3 in the morning, there were two blockages cleared -- of course, though, in the process, the dog ran away.

At 5 in the morning, the phone rang. Some one on the other side of a nearby major five lane road had found the dog and Justin went to pick him up. Justin snoozed a bit more, but then we went to church, grabbed a quick and rather un-Mother's day-ish (but it was all we were up for) lunch at Sonic and came home and passed out while the larger children did puzzles. Then I ran another load of laundry and water started spewing all over the basement.

So the plumber returned. Sigh.

The only good news about the plumbing (besides this not being our house) is that all the sewer pipe problems came before the part of the pipe where the toilets empty in, so the nasty water leaking out contained stuff from the washing machine and dish washer, but not fecal matter. Nonetheless, it will be quite a clean up job.

We did, of course, call and report all this to the homeowners (who have, in fact, had problems in the past), but I think there still is some law out there that states that all plumbing problems must happen late at night, on the weekend, when the homeowners are away.