Winner of the Giveaway and A Noisy Pad

First order of business is to announce the Robin at Your Daily Dose is the winner of Tara Tyler's book, Pop Travel.  Congratulations, Robin!

Second order of business is to tell you what my A-Z challenge theme  is.  This is the first time I'm doing it on this blog.  It was a whole lot easier on my gardening blog, because I was able to plan.  This blog is random.  Which is pretty much the story of my life as a mom.  So the "plan" is to have a word for each letter of the alphabet and apply it to my mom experiences.  I might share a few stories from the past, or, if it so happens, I'll share a current story using the letter of the day.  We'll see how it all works out.

Now for the story:

My husband decided to tackle the big job of replacing our hot water tank. (I think we had all had enough of cold showers!)    This is not an easy job, and quite frankly, I'm amazed that he was able to do it.  Anyway, after the tank was in place, we tried running our water.  Let me just say, it sounded like a mega freighter blowing a fog horn in my house.  It was unbelievable!

"What is that?" I asked.

"Probably just some air in the pipes," my husband said.

The sound persisted through the evening, into the night, and was still there the next day. It obviously wasn't air in the pipes.

"Maybe it's the pressure regulator," my husband said.

I shrugged my shoulders.  "I don't know. But can you fix it?"

"Yep."  My husband got out his blow torch.

I went upstairs.  Two minutes later, the fire alarms went off. I covered my ears, got the dog out of the house, and went to check on the hubby.  "You okay?" I yelled over the shrieks of the alarms and the blow of the fog horn.

"Yeah.  No fire.  Just sensitive alarms that don't like blow torches," he yelled back.

Right.

After the alarms shut off, I went outside and stood in front of the house.  The fog horn blew again, and I just started laughing.  I think we won the prize for the noisiest neighbors on the block!

(Meanwhile, my teenage daughter was up in her room, in bed, trying to sleep through all of this. Unbelievable!  And in case you're interested, the problem that caused the noise was the expansion tank, which my husband fixed.  We no longer have a fog horn blowing in our house. Thank God!)