Reaping the Fruit of the Frost

As temps dip down again tonight, the residents of the Griffith household (and our HomeAway renter) find themselves without benefit of water. I got home from a morning in the office today to find we had no water. When I went to switch to reserve I found that it had never been switched back to normal from the last time we had it in reserve so we were truly all out of water. When I looked on the water meter it said we had run through 1275 gallons today. Whoopsie Daisies!

So I started looking for running water. I couldn't find any, but a call to our water system maintenance people led me through troubleshooting enough to find out that we were leaking a steady .3 gallons a minute--all that our RO system produces--and the leakage was somewhere after the water left the well house (thank heaven as there are so many pipes snaking every which way around tanks and through complicated equipment inside the well house that it would be a nightmare to find a break in there).

After walking all around the house twice and checking every hose bib to see if they'd been naughty or nice, I ended up back at the well house. Sure enough, right where the main water pipe exits the building--where the contractor was working this summer--the crappy old insulation had been removed from the pipe and never replaced. An old pvc valve in the pipeline had cracked open (rotted plastic and water pressure no doubt) and when I had the water on, it was gush-trickling from the break. I booked a plumber for tomorrow morning, I bought 10 gallon jugs of water from the grocery store for our renter and us, and now we hunker down and pretend we live in a house with no running water because, well, we do.

This little water snafu was just the cherry on top of the sundae that my last quarter has been. A quarter! When I said at dinner tonight that I hadn't had a break for several weeks--not since I started this SQL doc project--Dave pointed out that right before the doc project I had A Fair of the Art. So really I haven't taken a day off just to veg, sleep, and read (even on the cruise) for *13 weeks*!! That's over a quarter of the year! I seriously need a day completely off, and I am looking forward to having one after next Saturday, January 13--Jessie's fashion show date.

For now I console myself with going to bed and snuggling my comic-book-wielding spouse. It's going to be another freezing one tonight so there is no place better to be than under the down comforter. But that'll be after I use some of the purchased water to handwash my child's pants so she has something to wear to school tomorrow.