Flooding and The Escapees

Funny story. This past Sunday (the day after arriving home), I was walking out to the garage to do laundry when I noticed a pile of dry, but wet-looking, toilet paper in my yard. I thought it was strange, but was more interested in the task at hand to spend much time pondering. A little later I noticed a spot on the sidewalk that looked like what had been mud at the bottom of a puddle that had dried up. I asked Sara if there had been a lot of rain while we had been away and she responded, "No, but it was foggy a lot."

I was getting weirded out by the random stuff going on in my backyard, but gave up thinking about it too much. Monday evening, I went out to the garage to fold a bunch of my laundry that had accrued. When I was walking back to the house, Callaway was acting strange, sniffing around the lawn chairs and table we have sitting back there. Since my eyes were not accustomed to the dark after being in the lit garage, I kept walking and called him along with me. I saw Sara walking out to her car, when she yells, "did you know your cat was outside?" I look to my back door to find that it is open and Bella is crouching just outside the door.

Here's the thing. We don't let our cats outside. I had two cats when I was a child that had to have a leg amputated because they either got run over by a car or broke their leg doing who-knows-what. I wasn't ready to deal with that with my cats, so we opted for indoor-only cats. I freaked out and shooed Bella back into the house. As I finished the trek to the back door, I came across what appeared to be water flowing across the sidewalk. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from and decided to ask Travis if he had dumped a bucket of water outside. (Because he was magically able to mop the house, dump the water and hop into the shower during the 20 minutes it took me to fold laundry?)

When I got inside, I checked for the other two cats, but came up short one. I quickly grabbed a flashlight and ran back outside. Sagira was missing and I worry that if she ran away she would never come home. It's not that I doubt her ability to find her way back. It's more that I don't trust people to see a super-cute Bengal and just let it wander on by. Anyhoo, I immediately noticed her reflective eyes sitting over on the lawn chair that Callaway had been so interested in a few minutes earlier. Phew!

When I grabbed her I was quick to notice that she was wet and smelled like pee. I brought her inside and went to find Travis to see if he could help me solve this strange mystery. Turns out, the strange flowing water on my sidewalk and the escaping cats were totally unrelated. It was just too much weirdness for my brain to comprehend as separate situations. I must not have closed the door all the way when I went out to do laundry, and the flooding sidewalk is due to sewage backing up into my yard. AWESOME.

Travis immediately got pissed when we figured out that sewage was overflowing from a clean-out junction on our property. The last thing we can afford right now is a plumber. Lucky for us, Travis has his feelers out in the construction business. He called a buddy of his who's father is a plumber. He told us what to look for and when Travis told him what he saw he said, "call the city." Good enough for me! That's way better than paying a plumber to check things out and find that it's not a problem he could solve.

Travis called the city the next morning and they came right away to jet-clean the lines. Unfortunately, that resulted a multitude of nastiness being forced out of the line and into my backyard. And it's still there. Because I don't want to touch it. I didn't actually notice it until this morning on my way out for work because it was dark when I got home last night.

I will most likely force Travis to spray everything down with the hose. Last thing I need right now is rampant bacteria growth in my backyard, what with Lil' Wodie growing in my belly and everything.