House sitting for my aunt was PARADISE, I tell you. I went from living with a whole mess of family to, well, just me. I didn’t even have to worry about the cat (although I did really miss her and I think she actually missed me, too). I had three bathrooms, a kitchen, dining room, living room, office, and bedroom, as opposed to one bathroom, two bedrooms, a kitchen, dining room (AKA my room; that’s another post for another day), and the living room. I always had hot water, never had to wait to take a shower, and a fridge that produced ice and water.

I also had an intruder.

As I dried off after taking a nice hot (bubble!) bath in my aunt’s Whirlpool tub, I heard a sound downstairs. Suddenly, being alone didn’t appeal to me too much. “Who’s there?” I said, feeling a little silly. It was probably just the house settling. Quit being a baby, I told myself. There’s no one here.

I got dressed and turned the water on to brush my teeth. A sound erupted, something between the sound of a vacuum cleaner and a tornado. It split the sound barrier in half, so if I screamed I never heard it. I ran into the hall, in the direction where the sound came from. Immediately I realized that it was coming from Katarina‘s bathroom and ran right in. I don’t know what ran through my head, or what I expected to find or what I thought I would do when I found it.

If the whirring, mind splitting tornado sounded loud in the master bedroom, it was World War II in LA in the bathroom. I peered into the tub and read one word on the digital display: DRY.

The tub was drying itself.

A self-drying tub had given me a heart attack and had almost prompted me to call my dad. I can just imagine the conversation we would have had:

“There’s an air raid alarm going off in the house! I don’t know where my uncle keeps his ammo! Come get me!”

He would have arrived to find me huddled under the bed with a walkie-talkie clutched in my hand. Or my stuffed penguin.