Thanks for friends and for family

We have plenty of water outside because it's raining this morning, but we don't have running water in the house.  Yesterday afternoon we finally got our new water heater home with the help of an old friend of Jimmy's who just happened to be at the right place at the right time.  We no sooner had driven off the Lowe's parking lot when the water heater began tilting back & forth.  It didn't fall over, it was just tipping so we pulled over into the emergency lane and Jimmy began trying to tie it more securely when a pickup truck loaded with building supplies stopped and offered to take our hot water heater home for us in his truck.   It was Paul Lewis, and what a blessing it was to see him.

Paul first took us to his beautiful home where we visited with Sue and their two small dogs.  Jimmy & Paul unloaded the pickup and then it was off to our house with the hot water heater.  We are both very thankful for friends like Paul and Sue.

Jimmy turned off the power to the whole house and began removing our old water heater.  Brian stopped by as he took Reva to her doctors appointment and with his voltage meter found the right breaker to turn off, so we had electrical power to our house again.  Thank you Brian because I wasn't looking forward to living without electricity until this job was done.

Late yesterday afternoon and last night Jimmy tore out the old floor where the hot water heater had leaked, and today Doug is coming over to help Jimmy rebuild the floor and install the new hot water heater.  Hopefully all will get done today and I'll have water by tonight.  But in the meantime, Thank God for baby wipes and rainwater caught from the roof.

Jimmy was hot last night

Primary election day is not a good day to call for a plumber, but I finally spoke to one who was referred to me by the first plumber I called because he couldn't come any sooner than tomorrow. The second plumber can't be here for TWO HOURS because he's babysitting their foster children while his wife works the election polls, so he was very apologetic about it taking him so long to get here. I chuckled to myself because two hours isn't long to wait at all. I just hope the plumber doesn't have some kind of emergency and calls to cancel.

When I woke up I told Jimmy to let me call the plumber and ask for help because if he called then the plumber would be thinking to himself, "Why don't you just fix the leak you Bozo?" but when a woman calls they expect her to be helpless in these situations. Now I hear you thinking to yourself, "why isn't Jimmy fixing the leaks himself?" Well, he was going to fix the one under the bathroom sink himself and let the plumbers work on the main water line leak, but I won't let him and you ask why??? Because he was HOT HOT HOT all night long...

Jimmy was and is running a fever, but like a man he insists he doesn't have one, that this is just his normal body temperature...well it's not! and I should know. It's been 2 days since the birthday party and one of the babies he kissed was sick and we all know that when grandparents kiss a sick baby chances are they're going to get what the baby had, but Jimmy can't help himself...if there's a baby or small child around, he's going to kiss it, and especially if it's sick and doesn't feel good.

Don't forget to get out and vote today.

Not exactly what I had planned for tonight

Of all the times to spring a leak, 11 p.m. is not the time to have one. So picture this....

Jimmy walked into our bathroom and opened the cabinet under the sink only to find everything water-soaked. We both immediately blamed Petey our tomcat because he loves to tip glasses of water over if he finds one and sometimes one of us leaves a plastic glass of water in the sink for Princess to drink fresh water out of.

So here we are, at 11 p.m., cleaning out everything under the bathroom sink. I didn't know that you could cram so many old empty and half full plastic bottles in one place, but I think we broke the record. I even found Jimmy's ex-wife's tooth brush under there and Jimmy asked me how I knew it was her's. That was easy, it had written right on it, "Pat's toothbrush," and if I'd known it was there I would have used it to clean around the toilet. (I know I'm being naughty).

As we pulled out the wet stuff it became clear that the leak wasn't Petey's fault after all. Jimmy must have hit or moved something under there because now we had a nice even spray of water, just what we wanted to see this late at night. Luckily there was a turnoff knob under there and when Jimmy twisted it, it did little to stop the leak. Clearly this knob wasn't the right knob for this particular pipe, so Jimmy headed for the spider infested dark crawl space to shut off the main valve coming to the house. This shut off most, I say most of the water, but there was still a little water getting through and the leak needed to be stopped for tonight until it could be fixed in the morning.

So now I'm in the front yard at midnight holding a flashlight over the water meter. The water meter is about 3 feet under ground and the hole over the meter is filled with water so the water has to be dipped out with a plastic bucket and since we couldn't find a plastic bucket at midnight we cut the top off a gallon plastic jug of milk and dipped the water out and then we found mud covering the meter. Once the mud was removed the hole filled with water again and had to be dipped out again. We have lots of ground water around here and we've had lots of rain.

Then the fun began....

trying to turn the lever with an adjustable wrench and a pipe wrench under water with no visibility. After finally, and not easily nor quickly, getting the lever turned WAS NOT EASY so we both agreed that one of those water meter turn-off tools should be our next purchase because we seem to spend a lot of time meeting at the water meter at midnight.

So our water is totally shut off to the house until we call for help tomorrow morning. Jimmy is going to fix the leak under the bathroom sink himself and let the plumbers fix the leak in the crawl space, cause who wants to go under there with all those nasty spiders....it gives me the creeps just thinkin of them.

So this is how we spent our night.