I have one of those pretty water features everyone raves about. Apparently.

My child's been singing 'I've got a moldy basement", to the tune of I've Got a Golden Ticket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Which is funny cuz he's never seen the original movie with Gene Hackman, and he's only heard the South park and Family Guy Versions of the song.
And yes, our basement is moldy, we've had so much rain here that our ground is fully saturated and it just kinda pours through. We had a plumbing guy who came in when we first moved into the place, and he replaced the taps in our tub and tightened up the connection to the tap in the backyard because that's what the landlord said needed fixing. (I found a lot more stuff over the year, btw) So this spring, when the snow had thawed and the grass was green again, my son found the irresistible urge to play with his water guns, and tried to fill them with the tap in the backyard. (the first time we've used that tap since the guy came and "fixed" them) So he comes in the house, all happy and smiley and said,' hey mom, when you turn on the water in the backyard, it makes a waterfall!'
and I was all, whaaat?.....
So I go check, and sure enough, when the tap is turned on, the water drips down under the siding from one edge of our wall to the other, giving it a waterfall effect. And where does this water go? The Basement.  So the tap is not allowed to be used right now until the landlord gets it fixed properly.
And from the two of these things combined have left my basement wet and musty smelling, little white moldy patches sprouting up from cracks in the cement (at least the basement was mostly unfinished, if that'd been carpet, it would have really sucked) and The only three cardboard boxes in our plastic mounds of  storage, just happen to contain all the baby books and pictures. Which are now all grey and bubbly and before the time of digital so there's no backup shots and we just have to salvage what we can.
And since no one goes to that side of the basement, no one realized what had happened until a couple of weeks ago. so that sucks.

ps. oh and the bathroom taps gave on us a couple weeks ago, so until the plumber came last week to fix (different plumber this time, really yummy to look at too, you could tell he was fresh out of an apprenticeship and still full of hopes and dreams, not like those old experienced plumbers who are now wishing they'd chosen a different vocation, because at some point digging around in other people's Shit just isn't fun anymore) So for a coupla weeks we had to use a pair of pipe wrenches to turn the tiny little knob that's hidden inside the tap just so we could have a shower.


pps. what my son neglected to tell me until after I found the sopping mess that was my memories for when I get Alzheimer's, was the amount of time the water was on in the backyard that day. thinking a couple of minutes? try almost two hours, because my son thought it was pretty and didn't want to turn it off. heh heh...