LAUSR

You've seen it in the movies- the protagonist inexplicably blinks awake from deep sleep because some silent but menacing force threatens. Something like that happened to me early one Sunday morning not long ago. And as soon as I stepped out of bed, I knew things were going to be bad, because the floor of my secondstory bedroom was covered with water. It didn't take long to identify the source as I splashed down the hallway: the washing machine. An inlet valve had gotten stuck in the open position after we put in a load late the previous night. Eventually, the door of this front loader gave way. For several hours, water sluiced from our second-floor laundry closet onto just about every horizontal surface in the house-and quite a few of the vertical ones, too.