I have this afternoon off from work, lucky thing too. I came home at noon with Mark and we ate lunch together. He went back to work, I cleaned up the kitchen and then came upstairs. After about 15 minutes I went downstairs to put a loaf of bread on in the bread maker. While I was standing at the counter, putting the ingredients into the pan, I heard our water start running. It freaked me out a bit and I jumped a little because I knew that I was the only person in the house. I went the door and looked outside to see if someone had turned our tap on (next to the driveway). There was water running everywhere! It was running down the side of the house onto the driveway around where the faucet is.

I called Mark on his cell to find out what to do (I didn't know which valve turned off which thing - all of the plumbing for our house is in our kitchen behind our washer and dryer - we don't have a basement). He told me where the water shut off for the house. I hung up with him and couldn't find the valve he told me about. I could hear that the water was running behind the dryer (not behind the washer, where he told me the shut off was). I realized that the external water shut off had been left open all winter and once I turned that water off, the mini-niagara falls I had happening the driveway subsided. It made me feel much better. I'd been running around thinking about how much it would cost to get a plumber to come to our place on a Friday night. Fortunately, this is something that we'll be able to have fixed in the spring. I think that the pipe burst around the faucet handle, just under the siding. It had probably been frozen solid but the sunny warmth hitting our house this afternoon melted it and blammo, instant water fall!

I'm so glad that I was home this afternoon. Ordinarily on Fridays, we go out after work and don't get home until 7 or so. If we had done that tonight, we may have come home to a skating rink where our driveway was. Yikes! Homeownership, it's never a dull moment!!