Just My Luck

I've been following my friends the Murphys' blog (they are in Samoa--check out their blog with the link to the right if you want to read somebody who's a lot funnier than me). Lately, Philip's posts have centered on his recently-discovered termite problem. For all the times I've thought, "Gee, I wish I could have something cool like Philip to write about," this was definitely NOT one of those times. Naturally, as soon as I began to congratulate myself about not having a major home repair problem, we got one. A couple of nights ago, we got a hard freeze. No big deal, but we never saw it coming, and didn't drip the faucets. I went to take my shower the next morning, and the water sputtered once and then just stopped. Not good. Turned out it was not frozen or broken pipes (I called my father-in-law, who knows everything about hardware, and he made the very smart call to check the water meter... it wasn't spinning, so we had no leak). Of course, nobody has time at 6:30 AM on a workday to deal with such things, so for the last couple of days, we've all shared the kids' bathroom and waited for the weekend. Pop (my father-in-law) graciously offered to swing by this morning and have a look. He came by while we were both at work, and called Mrs. Sal to say there was no big deal--the shower head was gummed up, and he was going to replace it.

Well, she came home at lunchtime to find him just packing up his tool bag. He proudly took her in to show her the repairs. But he took her in to the kids' bathroom--the one that was working JUST FINE. To add insult to injury, not only had he changed the only working shower-head in the house, he had replaced it with the exact same energy-efficient model that I had unscrewed and thrown away when we bought the house because it basically just dribbles on you. So We had gone from two full baths to a bath and half down to... what, a bath and a quarter?

The story does have a happy ending, however. Once Pop realized that (A) it was the master bath that didn't work, and (B) the "broken" shower head really wasn't, he decided that the best possible solution would be to try putting those two together. Voila! All's well that ends well--I can't wait to actually shower in comfort again. Thanks, Pop!