Does your carpet splash?

Because mine does. I thought that having to take my husband to the ER was a fluke (he's fine by the way, though we had a scare). Then when Ragsy's daycare caught fire and was closed all week, I became suspicious. Now I'm certain of it. The world is laughing at me. Hard.

Today we had a handyman install a new in-line water filter for us. A simple enough job - it only took him 45 minutes. We just hadn't had the time to do it ourselves and didn't see us making it a priority, so we decided to have someone else do it. So, he completed the job, I wrote the check and we went to lunch.

We got back about an hour to an hour and a half later. The first thing we heard on returning was the sound of water gushing. Water is not supposed to gush unless the faucet is on. We don't generally leave the faucet on when we're leaving. And even when the faucet is on, it's not supposed to gush from two places at once in the house. So, I ran into the kitchen directly into about a quarter inch of water. I could have floated a boat.

So, after I found the valve and turned it off, we immediately began mopping up the mess. As I was running down the stairs, though, there was more water gushing. Oh, holy hell. The ceiling. Water was pouring out a vent and through all the electrical fixtures in the basement ceiling, flooding the carpet in not just one, but three rooms and most of the hall downstairs. And the closet.

So we called the handyman back, someone came over and it was determined that the filter was incorrectly constructed and must have popped off due to water pressure, spewing water everywhere. They're going to fix it anyway and get settlement from the manufacturer (by the way, don't buy an aquasana filter unless you want to be able to float a boat in your kitchen), but we still have four or five fans going 24/7 for the next five to seven days. And the cats are living in the garage since my mom's here in the baby's room. Luckily we haven't lost anything.

I'm hoping that this will be the last thing to happen. You know how they say that bad things happen in threes - I think this qualifies as both bad and number three. I'm still going to check on the cats, though. I'm a little afraid to think of them in the garage by themselves given our recent spate of "luck."