Indoor Flood Zone

Chris' mother generously supplied us with a water filter system. It sits on the countertop and uses some advanced process to remove all the icky stuff from your water, a la Brita, only much better. It has a little spicket at the bottom of it and it holds several gallons of water at a time. So you dump water in the top, and a few minutes later... Voila! Drinking water so clean you can taste it.

So I bet you know where this is going. It's not really that bad, but it IS funny enough to share.

Chris is not a typical guy. When I say that, what I mean is that he actually reads the directions if not BEFORE assembling something... at least during the process. I love this about him, because when he has directions for something, he usually does it right... even if he's never attempted it before.

Needless to say, he has never attempted to put a Nikken water filter system together. So this morning after we had our waffles, he pulled it out of the box in all its little pieces and began to follow the directions. And he did a fine job... really. In fact, this is the first project he's done where there was absolutely no cursing or swearing through the entire ordeal. And despite the fact that I was hesitant to have yet one more thing sitting on the counter all the time, I must say it looks quite nice.

With the thing assembled, we headed upstairs as a family to begin our Sunday chores. They revolve around laundry, but include such subcategories as stripping and remaking beds, changing out towels, etc. Soon after we started the laundry running, it was time for Athena's nap, so Chris tucked her in and he and I got on our respective computers to pass some time and relax.

About an hour into her nap, I realized I was hungry. (An aside here: when you are pregnant, there are only two states of being... hungry and stuffed. There is no midpoint. One minute, you are content and feel completed sated, the next you feel you could eat your way through the State Fair. But I digress...) So I headed back down to the kitchen to forage for some lunch. And there I came face-to-face with about a quarter inch of water covering most of the counter and dripping onto the floor in front of the sink. By some weird luck, the only spot on the counter not affected by the mini-flood was where I had my handmade cookbook with all my favorite recipes in it. Someone was smiling down on me today, for sure.

Of course, the cause of the flood was immediately obvious: the water filter system. Apparently Chris stopped reading the directions right at the end, so he didn't realize that having the little lever in the "up" position meant that the spicket was open. Fortunately, it wasn't all the way open... just enough to let the water sort of drizzle out. And two beach towels cleaned up the minor deluge in seconds. So we're not talking post-Hurricane clean up efforts. We didn't have to call in FEMA or anything. Still, it was a sight. Spicket is closed now.

One day, perhaps we will get the hang of home ownership... The next project is to fix the huge holes in our wall where we tried to put a dog gate up and ended up merely tearing out chunks of dry wall.