The first morning that I stepped in it, I thought “Ugh! That is gross!”, but I cleaned it up and thought that was the end of it.

The second morning that I stepped in it, I thought “Ugh! That is gross!” but I cleaned it up and thought that must be the end of it.

The third morning that I stepped in it, I thought “Ugh! WTF??” but I finally realized that it was water, not cat pee and that was actually a bit of a relief – I figured that Charles and I could handle fixing a leak in the pipes for our basement sink (attempting to determine why the cats would pee on the floor would have been much more difficult).

The fourth time (I missed stepping in it!) I finally remembered to tell Charles that we have a leak in the pipes for our basement sink. Except that it wasn’t our sink (that would be too easy). Instead, it is coming from our very ancient water softener.

And that, my friends, is a bit more expensive.

So for two days, I have resisted looking up the cost of a new water softener. We cannot get by without a water softener (our water is waaaaay too hard^*) and I’m not really sure that fixing our current one would be cost-effective, if it can even be done given its age. But with new windows arriving on Friday, and a new fence hopefully arriving soon-ish (I really, really, reeeeaaaaally want our fence) and a baby arriving in September … well, having to shell out for a new water softener is a little hard to take. So instead, I clean up the small puddle (it is a very small puddle) that appears on the basement floor and I cross my fingers that one day it won’t be a lake.

^{* I’ve always heard that Waterloo has very hard water, but never actually remember the number. This helped me out (bolding mine)”… the Regional Municipality of Waterloo has some of the highest levels of hard water (defined as containing large amounts of calcium and magnesium) in the country… Anything over 10.5 grains per gallon (180 mg/L) is considered to be extremely high and is labelled in the fifth category as “very hard”: the estimated average level of water hardness in the Waterloo Region is 22 grains per gallon (376 mg/L), more than twice the level necessary to be included in the top category.” Fun.}