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This morning the kitchen sink broke.

Of course it broke. We’re about to leave on a vacation. The house knows when we’re preparing to travel because it seems to always choose those inopportune times to quit working in some way.

Sometimes the house knows before we even know. For instance, the year my grandfather died, the water heater started leaking all over the place about one day before we received the sad news that Grandpa had died and we would need to leave the state within four days or so to attend the funeral. (And it all got resolved before we left town.)

John was rinsing out his bowl this morning after breakfast when suddenly the water ceased pouring out of the kitchen faucet. He tried the hot water. Still nothing. His first suspicion was that a water main broke, but upon examination every other faucet in the house worked.

It turned out that even the dishwasher right next to the sink and the sprayer in the sink worked.

After an early morning call to my dad, we felt confident the problem had to be with the faucet itself, not the pipes or the stems, or the shut-off valves.

Of course, the easiest solution (taking the aerator off the end of the faucet to see if it was clogged up) did not resolve the issue.

Can I also just say that I went to bed very late last night because I kept hearing “something” rattling around in our house? I was having flashbacks of mice in the kitchen in Amsterdam, but even though I made John get up, turn on all the lights in the house and search for critters, we were unable to find the source of the noise.

Then the lights went off again, John got back in bed, and I heard the noise…again. And I was almost certain I faintly smelled something burning. John said he did too, but he may have just been trying to make me feel a little less paranoid. (It didn’t work, by the way. I felt terribly paranoid and a bit crazy.) We couldn’t determine the origin of the smell either.

I think I fell asleep an hour later. Thus, I am not in the best of moods to deal with the broken kitchen sink faucet.

After John left for work I discovered the critter making all the noise last night.

Don’t worry, it’s not horrendous. It was some strange bug that I think is supposed to fly (thank goodness it was dying and incapable of soaring through the air around my head!), but was injured to such a degree that it was simply jumping around the hall bathroom. I smacked it with a shoe (John’s…ssshhhh, don’t tell him) and disposed of it.

And to my relief I finally got ahold of my in-laws’ “guy” to come fix the faucet this evening. Which he did, in a matter of ten minutes. The explanation I got was that the valve that lets water, hot or cold, into the faucet had a build-up of calcium and other debris preventing the water from getting through. It works now.

What with all the trip preparations, it may be a while until the next post. I know two of you may be disappointed, so I apologize.

Do have a nice weekend!