Burble

This is an argh of quiet desperation.

Actually, I'm not really desperate.

The DH and I are at the Laundromat. Are we here because we wanted to catch up on bedding? No. Are we here because we're doing a bunch of pillows? Wrong again.

I went into our laundry room looking for underwear. (C'mon everyone, sing it from Dr. Horrible! Underwear ... tumbling ...) I heard what I thought was a rat really going to town, nibbling. After I hit the wall a couple of times with no effect, all the while wondering how the rat could have possibly gotten in there and where to set a trap to catch it, I realized it didn't sound exactly like a rat nibbling. Actually, it sounded like water dribbling and burbling behind the wall.

And I had this awful, sinking feeling that the wet towels on the floor weren't from the kids dumping the towels in there after some weird cleaning scheme like I'd initially thought. You see, those damp towels had been damp for a couple of days, and--

"Rory! Turn off the water upstairs! I need to check something!"

"What?"

I dashed upstairs and got him to stop washing his hands, then hurried downstairs again. Still dribbling. It wasn't drain pipe noises, which ended my last hope that I was just hearing normal plumbing sounds.

It was raining outside.

And the dogs had been digging.

Sure enough, when my DH looked outside, a little stream was running down a deep trench they'd dug straight toward the laundry room.

The director of my life cued the adventure/danger music as I ran out to the shed, grabbed a shovel, and began to reroute the water toward the French drain my DH and the boy had installed a few years ago.

For about fifteen more minutes, we heard the dribbling behind the wall, and then it stopped.

Luckily there's a drain in the laundry room floor, so this didn't affect any other part of the house, and also (sort of) luckily the towels and stuff on the floor soaked up a lot of the moisture.

So here we are at the Laundromat (with my freezeray I will STOP the pain) washing all the wet stuff. Some of it was gross because all the laundry on the floor had been quietly soaking up rainwater that had run behind the wall and onto the laundry room floor for the past few days, unbeknownst to us, and did what wet laundry on the floor is wont to do.

Stink.

Argh.