When I got home from karate class and was getting out the keys to unlock my condo, I heard the sound as if someone were taking a shower inside. I thought that was a bit odd, since I live alone. I thought maybe the sound was coming from a neighbor's condo, but once I opened my door I knew the sound of pouring water was coming from inside. I was hoping maybe it had just started pouring rain outside and I left a window open, or maybe somehow someone broke in and as a joke decided to turn on all my faucets. But, alas, sadly that was not the case. It turned out the water source pipe for the toilet in my upstairs bathroom somehow started leaking in a really big way. It was basically spraying water full force onto the floor. Since I live alone, no one was home to witness this occurance and the bathroom floor eventually flooded and then the water seeped through the floor and came out the ceiling in my downstairs living room. There is a sprinkler head in the ceiling directly above my couch in the living room and the water found that the easiest path to come out. It was pretty funny to see - it looked like someone was running a garden hose out of my ceiling directly onto my couch. I quickly turned off the water pipe in the bathroom, threw towels on the floor in the bathroom to help collect the water, and put some buckets on the already soaked couch to collect any remaining water coming out of the ceiling. Then I figured I should at least take a picture - how many times does one get to see their living room flooded? (hopefully not too often). Unfortuntely, by the time I found my camera, the water slowed down quite a bit, so this picture is all I got.
I thought it was a funny coincidence that this same problem happened at the dojo just last week - a shop upstairs had a toilet water pipe leaking and the water started coming in through the dojo ceiling.
I'm not really sure what the end result of this flood will be. Right now I have a very very wet couch and carpet, and a few of my Japanese language books got a bit wet. I think given time it should all just dry out. At least the water was clean and it wasn't a waste water pipe that was leaking. :-)
One interesting thing that happened in this whole event was my sloppiness in doing laundry paid off. I had done a load of laundry last night, and in the process of sorting the same colors to put in the wash, I had emptied the hamper and left all the remaining dirty laundry on my bathroom floor. All this dirty laundry helped soak up a lot of the water. If it hadn't been on the floor, even more water would have poured into my living room. Also, I had been sorting and folding the clean laundry on the couch in my living room this morning and I hadn't yet put it away. As a result, all this clean laundry soaked up a lot of the water that would have otherwise gone into the couch. Woohoo! For once my procrastination paid off in two ways! Not that I encourage procrastination... it's a really bad habit in general. I've been told that it's my fatal flaw. (Thanks mom!)
