Several weeks ago it was Friday the 13th, and we had quite a day. I jotted down notes right afterwards to turn into a blog post; it took me a bit longer than I anticipated to write this. So, here goes:
In a way, our Friday the 13th really started a few days prior. Wednesday evening, the water company notified us that our neighborhood was under a boil order. Apparently a chlorine pump failed, and once it was fixed, they needed two straight days of passing water tests before the boil order could be lifted. That likely meant Saturday. Bummer.
Friday got off to an early start. We were woken up at 6am by loud yowling and hissing sounds from the cats. I first thought they were in a massive fight. We got up and hurried downstairs. Both cats were below the basement window and in a very agitated state with puffy tails. I decided they probably were not fighting with each other, but guessed they were reacting to a neighborhood black cat who had been walking through our backyard every so often in recent weeks. We couldn't see anything out the window, though. The cats calmed down after a minute or two, so Wendy and I went back to bed. Right when I finally got back to sleep my alarm went off. Ugh.
I checked the trail cam in the morning to see if it held any clues to what the cats saw. The only videos I found were of a deer walking through our yard early in the morning, but not at the moment the cats had freaked out.
The rest of the morning was fairly unremarkable, except for the fact that I was very tired.
At lunchtime, I dropped one of our cars off at the dealer for its routine maintenance. Wendy picked me up and we drove home.
As soon as we got home, a plumber texted that he was on the way. We had scheduled him to come by to fix a tiny leak in a valve before it became a bigger issue. He arrived, shut off water to the house, replaced the valve, and turned the water back on. It took about an hour, and then he left.
Right after he left, Wendy left to get her covid and flu shots. While she was gone, the dealer called to say our car was ready.
A few minutes later, I was completely startled by the sound of the faucet on the outside of our house being turned on, and water flowing through the pipes. "Who on earth is doing that?!" I thought. I looked out the front window and saw a guy from the water company, with a bunch of water-testing equipment spread out on our porch. I went out and chatted with him for a few minutes. He was testing the chlorine samples in 5 houses around the neighborhood, and had chosen our house because it was near a fire hydrant. In his first test, the chlorine level was too low, so he was letting water run from the faucet for a few minutes before he tested again. That was all well and good, but it would have been nice if he'd given me a heads up first.
As we finished our conversation, Wendy got home from getting her vaccines. We immediately got in the car and drove to the dealer to pick up the other car. By the time we got home the water company guy and his testing equipment were gone.
A little bit later, we heard yowling, hissing, and a thud from the basement. We went downstairs and found Chili on the window sill hissing at the neighborhood black cat in the backyard. I went outside and chased the black cat away. That's surely what spooked the cats that morning. I also made the connection at this point between a black cat and Friday the 13th.
After a while, I heard the sound of our outside faucet being turned on again. The water company guy was back. This time he was also flushing the hydrant near our house. A hose snaked from the hydrant and across our driveway, where a truly huge stream of water sprayed into our yard.
At this point it's now late afternoon and it's been a crazy day. We decided to hit the easy button and order pizza for dinner. For the first time in a long time, Dominos actually delivered our pizza on time, which was very welcome.
Right before the pizza was delivered, we got an automated call from the water company. Was the boil order finally lifted? Nope. There'd been a water main break and now we would have no water for the next 12 hours. Oh, and this extended the length of the boil order, too. Ha! That's. just. great.
Ugh.
After dinner, I looked out the window and was surprised to see a van in our driveway. We had momentarily forgotten that our farm CSA vegetables were being delivered on Friday instead of the normal Sunday. We got the vegetables and packed them into the fridge.
We then went for a walk around the neighborhood. We saw a bunch of water streaming out from the bottom of our neighbor's driveway. The water flowed into a ditch, down the hill a few houses, across a pipe under the road, and poured out into the pond. Yep, that was the water main break.
The evening was actually fairly relaxing. Around 9pm, though, we started to hear the sound of heavy machinery. I went outside and saw 5 or 6 big trucks dropping off construction equipment, like a backhoe. They were about to start repairing the water leak.
What a crazy day it had been! When we went to bed, we could still hear the sound of heavy machinery in the distance.
Around 5:30am Saturday morning, I woke up again to the sound of cats yowling and hissing. I ignored it and went back to sleep. We didn't have a chance to sleep in, though, because at 8am one of the cats knocked the phone handset off a shelf in the office, which hit the cable modem, knocking it off the desk, and sent the handset careening to the other side of the room. What a ruckus! There was no point in trying to get back to sleep after that.
This time the trail cam did record the black cat right at the moment the cats were hissing at it:
Thankfully the water main had been fixed by this point and we now had water. I heard from a neighbor that the construction crew worked throughout the night and finished up at 6am.
The boil order was finally, finally, finally lifted Monday morning.