She went about her normal bedtime ritual, anxious to get into bed to continue reading her book by flashlight as her husband slept beside her. It really was a pretty good book - the third in a series of fictional books about the last days told by an LDS author who based his plot on events prophesied in the scriptures. She barely had time to settle under the sheet and get engrossed in the next series of events when a loud "POP" emanated from what she thought was a corner of the vanity, so loud and so sudden she jumped and dropped her book with a thud on her chest. Looking at her peacefully sleeping husband, she thought nothing of it. But maybe she should have.

After reading for about an hour and finally beginning to feel drowsy, she turned off the flashlight, cuddled up next to her hubby and tried to sleep. After all, she had to be at the temple by 9 AM to substitute for a lady in the ward who needed to leave her shift early. Her thoughts kept racing back to the POP she had heard earlier, but again she put it out of her mind, for a while. Tossing and turning and turning and tossing, sleep just would not come. Looking up at the clock every half hour or so, she began to figure this was going to be another in a long string of sleepless nights. She heard him when he got out of bed for a pit stop. Seeing the moon beginning to come through the opened blinds, she thought he would probably close the blinds and climb back into bed. However, she heard the squeak of the bedroom door open as he silently slipped out of the room, probably to go sit for a while in the heated vibrating chair that seemed to help his aching back. Too soon he was back, standing over her. She felt rather than heard his presence, even though she still was not asleep. Turning over to look at him, she saw THAT face. That OH, NO, face peering at her. Without a word she knew what had happened. Saying "Oh, no," aloud she crawled out of bed and followed him downstairs.

Cold water greeted her bare feet as she stepped onto the basement floor. Lots of squishy cold water. She felt sick to her stomach. Following him down the hall toward the bedroom, she knew she should have gotten up five hours earlier to check on that POP she heard. Now that she thought about it, she realized she had been prompted to drag her lazy you-know-what out of bed and check things out. Had she done so, this whole disaster could have been averted. As it was, there was at least an inch of standing water in the sheep room, and certainly just as much being soaked up by the bedroom carpet, the hall closet, the bottom of the stairs, and the closet under the stairs.

She heard him say, "I knew I shouldn't have done that." Yesterday he had repaired the valve connection on the sprinkler system in the back yard because of a slow drip that had turned into an itty bitty waterfall. However, it didn't hold and popped the pipes apart with water shooting out like a fire hydrant. So, he fixed it again, but yet another repair job gone awry. So today he fixed it for a third time. Parts of the yard were drying up from lack of water, so he knew he had to get that system going again. He set the time to turn the sprinklers on about 9:30 PM. It was at 10:30 PM that she heard the POP, the sound that indicated the repair had broken again. He knew he should have tested the system before letting it go into automatic mode. But he hadn't, and she had ignored the prompting to check on the POPping sound. Now they were in a predicament. It was 3:30 AM, and the basement was partially flooded. She called the insurance company to see if this casualty was covered by her homeowner's policy, but of course was told to call back after 8 AM eastern time. So she called a flood disaster clean-up company, but he couldn't get anybody out to help for about 4 hours. Hmmmph. Might as well wait until she could get in touch with the claims adjuster.

So, the water is sitting in the basement. We emptied the sheep room and the two closets, moved some furniture around, and are now waiting to call the insurance company again. Now, I'm sleepy, but it's too late to go back to bed. Man, oh, man. The problems we get ourselves into because we don't listen when the Spirit speaks.