It never rains but it pours
Nov. 28th, 2004 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7... she says, arranging buckets and pans under the leaky gutter outside. I was mud-wrestling with my shrubs this morning, trying to get them into the ground so they can soak up all this lovely rain. So now my front yard has an itty bitty lilac and two winged euonymous (burning bushes-- their leaves turn bright red in fall, and in the winter they have red berries) bushes, and in the back yard I've put the bigger lilac bush out by the telephone pole.
I came in and rinsed off the mud and clumped around in a foul mood, and tried to work on the NaNo novel, and felt generally wretched. Dave, meanwhile, has nearly completed work on the backup server, and decided to take a break to investigate the persistent faint smell of gas in the kitchen.
Sure enough, there's a leaky stopcock on the line to the stove. Crap. So we shut off the gas at the main switch and took that line all apart to get the stopcock off to go buy a new one, and only then realized we're going to have to somehow re-light the pilot light on the furnace. Crap. Well, there wasn't any other stopcock on the line before the leaky one, except the main one at the meter. So it had to be that one.
We do know what we're doing with the gas lines, as we spent an hour with Dad when he was last here going over the fundamentals of working with gas (with the pipe guages and the teflon tape and the soap-bubble trick to check for leaks, etc.). But we don't know what we're doing with the pilot light, and that sucks. (At least the stoves in the house both have electric pilots.)
So a call may go in to the gas folks. I hope not. I can't afford to pay the bill, much less a service call.
But. That may change, as we shall see in the more interesting and cheerful second half of this post.
In the midst of the chaos of taking apart the kitchen (the faulty stopcock is, of course, right behind the fridge-- which is just ducky, as it means that the leaking gas was going up the back of the refrigerator coils with all the associated electrical brouhaha that entails-- it's a bloody miracle the house hadn't exploded in the five years since the previous tenants put in their gas stove and started intermittently smelling gas and blaming the stove. But I digress.
In the midst of this chaos, the phone rings. I picked it up, leaping over the disconnected microwave to do so, and it was a soft-spoken, familiar, mild-mannered-sounding man. In fact, Tom from the bar in the airport.
"Are you still interested in a bartending job with us?" he asked mildly.
"Sure!" I answered. "Er, I mean, yes, very much, thank you." Ever graceful. And I wonder why I never get offered jobs.
"Can you start this week?"
"Well," I said, "of course, but, well, I have training for a part-time job on Monday and, well, Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday-- but on the evenings those last three days."
"Could you come in Tuesday morning then?" he asked.
"OK!" I said cheerfully.
So Monday I'll spend 8 hours at Local Bar, and then Tuesday I'll spend 7 hours at Airport Bar, come home, change, and go to Local Bar for 6 more hours.
This schedule will not remain. It, indeed, shall not stand. But.
If I survive...
It's money, folks. That's the important and crucial thing. Money. I have committed to being the one who pays all the bills this next six weeks, so that Dave can save for college, and if I have money... Oh, what a dream! I can say flippant things like "don't worry" and can do silly things like, oh, paying for stuff. Can you imagine?
Most likely, dear reader, you can, because you are not me, and have actually held down a job for a while now. But. Anyway. I can now imagine these things, and that's what's important.
:D
I came in and rinsed off the mud and clumped around in a foul mood, and tried to work on the NaNo novel, and felt generally wretched. Dave, meanwhile, has nearly completed work on the backup server, and decided to take a break to investigate the persistent faint smell of gas in the kitchen.
Sure enough, there's a leaky stopcock on the line to the stove. Crap. So we shut off the gas at the main switch and took that line all apart to get the stopcock off to go buy a new one, and only then realized we're going to have to somehow re-light the pilot light on the furnace. Crap. Well, there wasn't any other stopcock on the line before the leaky one, except the main one at the meter. So it had to be that one.
We do know what we're doing with the gas lines, as we spent an hour with Dad when he was last here going over the fundamentals of working with gas (with the pipe guages and the teflon tape and the soap-bubble trick to check for leaks, etc.). But we don't know what we're doing with the pilot light, and that sucks. (At least the stoves in the house both have electric pilots.)
So a call may go in to the gas folks. I hope not. I can't afford to pay the bill, much less a service call.
But. That may change, as we shall see in the more interesting and cheerful second half of this post.
In the midst of the chaos of taking apart the kitchen (the faulty stopcock is, of course, right behind the fridge-- which is just ducky, as it means that the leaking gas was going up the back of the refrigerator coils with all the associated electrical brouhaha that entails-- it's a bloody miracle the house hadn't exploded in the five years since the previous tenants put in their gas stove and started intermittently smelling gas and blaming the stove. But I digress.
In the midst of this chaos, the phone rings. I picked it up, leaping over the disconnected microwave to do so, and it was a soft-spoken, familiar, mild-mannered-sounding man. In fact, Tom from the bar in the airport.
"Are you still interested in a bartending job with us?" he asked mildly.
"Sure!" I answered. "Er, I mean, yes, very much, thank you." Ever graceful. And I wonder why I never get offered jobs.
"Can you start this week?"
"Well," I said, "of course, but, well, I have training for a part-time job on Monday and, well, Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday-- but on the evenings those last three days."
"Could you come in Tuesday morning then?" he asked.
"OK!" I said cheerfully.
So Monday I'll spend 8 hours at Local Bar, and then Tuesday I'll spend 7 hours at Airport Bar, come home, change, and go to Local Bar for 6 more hours.
This schedule will not remain. It, indeed, shall not stand. But.
If I survive...
It's money, folks. That's the important and crucial thing. Money. I have committed to being the one who pays all the bills this next six weeks, so that Dave can save for college, and if I have money... Oh, what a dream! I can say flippant things like "don't worry" and can do silly things like, oh, paying for stuff. Can you imagine?
Most likely, dear reader, you can, because you are not me, and have actually held down a job for a while now. But. Anyway. I can now imagine these things, and that's what's important.
:D
