So here I was, sitting at my computer contemplating a blog post about my new Crock Pot while Yrsa played contentedly on the floor and Brynja occupied herself with some game on the kids’ computer, when suddenly I heard a loud noise from the next room. A loud, gushing noise. A torrential noise, one might go so far as to say.

I jumped up in alarm and yelled, “What the hell was that?”

Brynja looked at me and shrugged. “Eh … maybe water?”

It was water, all right, and plenty of it, running into the room from one corner and quickly spreading across the floor. I ran and grabbed an armful of towels then made a series of increasingly frantic phone calls to Olof, finally reaching him after three or four attempts. By that point the water had stopped gushing and after some checking around I could see that it was coming from a pipe in the corner. After the initial surge it settled down to an intermittent trickle that was more or less manageable.

Olof had said that he would call his dad to see if he could come assess the situation, so while I waited for his help I got most of the mess cleaned up and set up a bucket under the pipe to catch the water. It wasn’t long before my father-in-law arrived, and he spent a half-hour or so checking it out but couldn’t figure out what exactly was the problem. He thought it probably had to do with the heating system, but since all of the radiators were still hot it was something of a puzzle. Olof talked to him again, then to me, and told me to try to get a plumber to come by.

Just then I was upstairs giving the little girls a snack, but said that I would start calling around as soon as I was downstairs again. I also suggested, strongly, that he come home as I didn’t know how much worse things might get, and it was increasingly difficult to manage both the water and the kids (Brynja, for example, had decided that my distraction made for an ideal opportunity to drag out a big ball of yarn and start stringing it around the house). He agreed, but the next bus didn’t leave for a little while, and then he had to walk in from the highway, so I couldn’t expect him for about an hour. I felt better, though, just knowing that he was on his way.

As luck would have it, I got hold of our usual plumber (a guy originally from Gothenburg, just for the record) on the first try, and he said he could come right over. When he got here, he did all the same things that Olof’s dad had done, and came away every bit as puzzled. Olof got home not long after the plumber arrived, and I left them to it and took the very tired baby in for a nap. Ultimately the plumber deduced that a plug in the pipe had broken, probably during the cold weather we had over the weekend, then when things warmed up today it broke away completely. Or something like that. I don’t really speak plumber-speak. Especially not Swedish plumber-speak. And absolutely not göteborgska Swedish plumber-speak. (Nothing against Gothenburgers, you understand, but they don’t talk like we talk.)

So, to make a long story a little bit shorter, the plumber put a new plug in, or on, or whatever, and Olof and his dad moved some furniture and pulled up some flooring so that everything could dry out, and things are mostly back to normal, except for the piles of wet and dirty towels and rugs filling up the bathtub. Those’ll take a while to get through.