Why my knees are covered in cat sh*t.

I have a problem in my house.

For some reason I am really really good at ignoring hissing.

Yep. When something starts to hiss, I tune it right out.

Which is a big NO-NO when you are a homeowner. When something in the house starts to hiss, and I am not talking about a radiator hissing noises here, it means something has either just broken, or is starting to break.

It's like when your kid suddenly goes quiet and you ask what they are doing and they say "nothing!" and really they are very quietly coloring in their little sibling with a Sharpie, from head to toe.

The first time I ignored the hiss, it was the day after some holiday - Christmas or Thanksgiving. Rather than check out what was causing the hiss ( I don't have radiators. There is nothing in my house that should hiss when it is functioning properly) I turned the TV up.

Now, mind you, if I heard anything OTHER than a hiss, I am all over it. When I first moved here and the crackhouse next door was still in operation, I kept a baseball bat beside my bed. I wanted to keep a big huge gun beside my bed, but that's not as aesthetically pleasing really. Besides, a baseball bat fits the inner city cliche SO much better...

Anyway, so there I am ignoring the hissing coming from the basement. Until I go to do laundry and it turns out that the hissing is coming from the washing machine water feed.

And there is about an inch of water on the basement floor.

So what is the first thing I do? I call Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.
FYI - My Dad is Superman. He can fix anything AND he knows everything. It ties in well with my Mom's ability to predict the weather and make a 10 course meal with just a can of chickpeas and an onion. They make quite a pair.

Dad comes over, gives me a basic overview of how plumbing works, helps me vacuum up the water (you can vacuum up water!?! extraordinary!) and sets everything back to rights in that calm and methodical way of his.

After one flooded basement, you'd think I've learned my lesson. But no.

Today it was 60-something degrees in Boston and raining. It flooded my backyard and turned everything to mush.

So I stayed in and fiddled around in the house. And tried to block out that faint hissing noise I started hearing when the rain stopped.

hiiissssssss, hissssssssss

Hmmmmm. Hard to hear over the music, but very faintly there.

Until I go outside to dump my peelings on the compost heap. Then the hissing is not so faint. And there is a lake at the bottom of my porch stairs.

Just as EvenSteven predicted it would, the garden hose burst. Because I "forgot" to crawl under the deck and turn off the water in the fall.

Crawling under the deck is something I hate doing. It's where the cats go to sh*t and where the creepy-crawlers go to mate. Blech!

However, this time there was no one to bribe into crawling under the deck and switching off the water so I had to do it myself. And I had to do it really fast, like pulling off a Band-Aid.

Which is why my knees now have cat poop and creepy-crawly carcass ground in them. Yuck.

See, this is why I ignore the hissing.