Water, water everywhere

There aren't going to be any pictures on this one. I'm too dispirited (not to mention exhausted) right now.

So I was up late last night. Some time earlier someone had started a wash load, and instead of filling and agitating, the washer kept filling... and filling... and filling... and spilling... and flooding. Two floors of flooding, in fact -- the main level and the basement, suddenly turned into swampland. I discovered this disaster around 1 a.m., when I was headed to bed and suddenly my bare foot made a horrifying *squish* on the carpet.

I ran upstairs and told Mom, who started freaking out, and got Jenny to come down and help with cleanup. (To be truthful, she did the lion's share.) After three hours of sopping up water with towels and a wet-dry vac, ripping out saturated padding from beneath the saturated carpet, attempting to rescue tons of items in boxes that were suddenly sitting in several inches of water in a raining basement, and other thrilling activities, we collapsed in bed and slept for a few hours.

The kicker is that all this happened (albeit less disastrously) just two months ago. Mom's insurance covered it then, and she had no idea whether they would cover it this time (it appears that it will be at least partially covered). Sears, the company that manufactured my mom's washer, claims there's nothing wrong with it and that these two floods were due to end-user error. So keep that in mind if you're considering buying a Sears washer, won't you?

The insurance adjusters and some cleanup people are on their way out now. And I have more cleaning to do, unfortunately. Ngh.