Once in the past (about 5 years ago) I had a roof leak which led to some dripping in my kitchen. It was basically a problem with drainage under snow cover and some minor flashing errors. But it wasn't fun while it lasted.

So, in the middle of last week I was pretty distressed to find a large puddle of water on the floor in my kitchen. Particularly since it was not in the same place as the prior leak.

In fact, this new puddle was strangely out in the middle of the floor. It was about 8 inches wide and 2 to 3 feet long. One end of it did run up next to the stove. That's a lot of water on a night when there wasn't any rain nor much snow cover on my roof anyway.

Here are some more peculiarities. It was a well defined puddle with no splashes. Though one end of it reached the stove, there was no water on the stove and none under the stove. There was no water on the ceiling.

The water was very clean, like ice melt. But the quantity was at least a whole tray of ice cubes. Since I don't use ice much, there was plenty available in the fridge, but almost no chance that any got out on the floor. I'd made pasta, but the pasta water naturally was pretty starchy.

Tony suggested that maybe it was Casper pee. Ok, he said ectoplasm, but I hear what I want to hear, OK? Anyway, I cleaned it up and started waiting to see if more would show up.

By the way, at the beginning of the week last week is was dang cold out here. Daytime temperatures in the singles and as soon as the sun went down sub-zeros. (Fahrenheit— I'm in the U.S..) On my way home from work I had to stop twice to bundle up some more — and it's only a 5 minute walk to my car from the office. Then while I was waiting for the car to warm up, I found out that the BiteMe valve on my water pack had frozen in those 5 minutes. I naturally had to quote from ‘Doctor Evil’ — “It's frickin' freezin' out here, Mr. Biggleworth.”

I know that I sometimes ramble in these little stories, but in this case I'm actually still on point. Get it?