It Could Have Been Worse
First of all, dear internet, get ready for a flurry of posts. We have so much to tell you! It’s time for some catching up. To start off, about 3 weeks ago, we had a heck of a weekend.
1. On Friday, I was running an errand for work with Joshua. I stopped near Burnet and 183 for an ambulance, but the guy behind me didn’t stop in time. Here was the result:
Our poor 1997 Honda Civic was totaled. It’s a real shame — I would have gladly driven that car for another 10 years. But we did get a nice settlement from the insurance co., and it’s all working out well. No one was hurt, so it could have been worse.
2. One of our servers for work is located in a facility downtown Austin. Since we got set up there, I have only had to go down to the facility a handful of times; if something goes wrong with that server, I can just connect to it remotely and fix the problem. But Friday night (the night of the car wreck), it just stopped working, and I couldn’t connect to it. I called the facility, and they rebooted the machine for me, but even that did not fix it. It was now 11:00 at night, and I had to drive to work, pick up the keycard needed to access the building, then drive downtown. At that hour, it’s a little spooky, but I didn’t have any trouble — I was able to fix the problem and be back in my car about 10 minutes later. It could have been worse.
3. The next day, Karianne gave a wedding shower for her friend Michelle, and it went very well. I got to hang out with Michelle’s fiance (now husband) Cody, which was fun (for me, at least; we pretty much just ran errands that I needed to do). So Saturday was going well, but that evening I ran a quick errand, and when I was pulling up in the driveway, Karianne called my cell phone.
“Water,” she said. “Water there’s water everywhere so much water.”
I asked where, she said the upstairs bathroom, and I bolted up the stairs. I ran into the bathroom, which (naturally) was covered in an inch of water, so (naturally) I slipped and my foot went into the bathroom cabinet at full speed. That hurt bad, but there was no time to think about it, so I clawed my crippled way over to the toilet and turned the water off.
Except it wouldn’t turn all the way off. There was still a slow trickle, and I was worried that if I tried to force the knob it would break off, and water would once again spew all over the place. I rigged up a way to divert the water into the bathtub, then went downstairs and called a couple of plumbers.
It was about 10 at night, so I got an answering service. While I was waiting for a call back, I took a measuring cup into the bathroom and timed the water coming out: 1 cup/30 seconds. That’s 1 gallon every 8 minutes, which sounded like a lot to me, until I checked my water bill. I’m paying something like $4/1000 gallons. So if the problem persisted for 48 hours at that rate, well, that’s an extra $1.44 on my water bill. Given that, it wasn’t worth calling out an after-hours plumber.
All in all, the plumber’s bill was $131 and the carpet by that bathroom smells a little musty (still working on that). It could have been worse.
