Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Weight Loss & Water Heaters

I lost almost a pound. Fabulous. There was some wandering off the path, and there may or may not have been a chocolate episode, so I’ll take that not quite a pound and run with it. The past ten days have revealed a few things:

1. I truly dislike exercising in the morning. It is impossible to exercise in the evenings. Right about now seems like a good compromise, but once again employment kills the fun.
2. Pei Wei’s Vietnamese Chicken Salad Rolls (the pinnacle of authenticity, I am sure) are darn tasty and only six WW points for the dish.
3. I require protein to function in the mornings. Subway has a reasonable egg/English muffin thing, but it’s too hot to eat while driving, the “egg white” is a rubbery disc that is microwaved to something approximating reality, and the guy who makes them isn’t a very cheerful fellow.
4. I can make a quick little omelet in the mornings, but so far I have been able to either exercise or cook – not both – before leaving for work.
5. My children will eat broccoli and asparagus in mass quantities so long as it’s served as part of Olive Garden's Ventian Apricot Chicken.
6. I am making said Venetian chicken this evening and just realized we have no tomatoes.
7. Rob can fix a water heater.

That was a graceless segue, no?

Our water heater had been slowly doing a lot less heating and a lot more sitting around and relaxing. Saturday night we did the responsible thing and drained it, only to find that it had no intention of returning the favor and giving us hot water. Realizing that we were in this for the long haul, and fresh from a grossly inflated plumbing invoice that left us wary and suspicious of anyone carrying a wrench, Rob and I decided that google and youtube could get us back to hot shower heaven. Sunday was, simply put, a comedy of errors. We knew we had sediment in the tank (everyone in San Antonio has sediment in their tanks) so we decided to use water pressure to flush it out. We filled the tank, hooked up the water hose to the tank spigot, turned the water on at the top and left the pressure relief valve open simply because it made a lot of impressive noise and sounded like important things were happening.

They were. The pressure relief valve diverts the flow to the overflow pipe, a pipe whose outlet is somewhere in our backyard. Had Rob not picked just the right moment to take out the trash, we would have flooded our air conditioner. As it was, we flooded everything around the air conditioner, garage and back patio. He dug a very nice trench from the side yard to the front, channeled the water into the front yard, turned everything off and headed to Home Depot. After acquiring two new heating elements and the appropriate tool that can be used for nothing but installing water heater heating elements, we noticed that despite everything being set to off, we could still hear water running. Obviously we had to turn it off using that spooky and often bug-occupied thingy in the hole in the front yard. Rob has a more technical term for it that currently eludes me. In any case, he spends a lot of time out there turning the water off – most memorably when he pulled a pin out of a random valve in the shower faucet and diverted the full force of the water main into our guest bathtub. The scene was eerily reminiscent of the Seinfeld episode when Kramer installed his contraband showerhead.

Back to the heater. There could be no cessation of water until I had washed the dishes (by hand) and done a load of laundry (on cold), so he had a short and fortuitous reprieve. Fortuitous because when the water was off and the tank drained, he had the pleasure of discovering approximately all the sand in the world (or maybe it was just 18-24 inches) in the bottom of our water heater. The numbers and charts at the San Antonio Water System Water Quality site are just a fancy way of saying our drinking water flows over limestone before it arrives at our house and we really should invest in a water softener. Using highly sophisticated methodology involving a spare swing set part and a grainy youtube video shot at a ninety degree angle with a phone camera, Rob was able to get most of that sediment out of the water heater and into our cute lime green cooler. Four hours later.

We are very thankful for his hard work and shall not point out that I keep an ugly old bucket in the garage exactly for situations such as this. Or maybe we just did.

Clean tank. Brand new heating elements. Water on. Tanked filled. Water hot.

No. Water cold.

Monday, wide awake after my bracing and rejuvenating shower, I frantically googled and called home with every suggestion I could locate. To no avail, Rob unplugged and replugged, reset breakers and pushed buttons on the thermostat. We were discussing our options when a co-worker overheard and very graciously emailed me her plumber’s name and phone number. I called, he was busy. I called four hours later, still busy. He called two hours later for directions, and at 8:30pm either salvation or a very large plumbing bill rang our doorbell.

It was the former – for $65 he took Rob into the backyard and showed him where to find the breaker for the water heater and other major appliances. I’m sure I was grinning like an idiot as I wrote the check, and I think Rob’s heart grew two sizes when a real live plumber told him he couldn’t have done a better job himself.

Happy wife, proud husband, clean children, functional appliance. A Monday night can’t get much better than that.

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