Today I was able to spend the day working from home. This is not that strange a thing, nor is it that monumental of a thing. I have done this before in fact. But generally I work from home because either I am sick and cannot make it into the office or my wife is sick and I need to take care of the kids or one (or more) of my kids is sick and I need to help Sandi take care of the house.

But today I stayed home because I had someone at the house working on my plumbing. See, the other day I was on the side of the house and noticed an awful smell coming from under the house. At the same time my wife was washing the dishes and I heard the sound of water flowing under my house. It was not like the sound of water flowing through a pipe. Instead it was more of the sound of water splashing into a pool.

A small trip into the crawl space yielded a find that I would have preferred to not find: an enormous pool of water beneath the house. And it was no ordinary pool of water. No, this was a full on pond of stagnant water. And it was growing every time the sink was used.

Now there are few things that make me happy about being a renter (no, I do not own my own home) but this is one of them. I was able to place a call to the landlord a few days ago and she set up a time for someone to come out and look at it, and if possible, fix the situation.

So the reason I was home today is because my house sprung a leak. Fortunately for me and my family it was fixed by early afternoon. Unfortunately the pipe leak was not the only thing that needed to be addressed. The fence in the rear yard needs to be shored up because it is at the bottom of a downward sloping easement and happens to be falling into my neighbors yard. The nice thing is that my neighbor has a huge tree in his yard that is holding up the fence right now so it is not as bad as it could be.

The nice thing is that the fence will be fixed within a few weeks. But of course, since these two things got fixed today wouldn’t you know it I found out my heater went out tonight. So while I can sleep tonight not having to worry about the effects of a small lake seaping down into my foundation I will have to do it under fourteen blankets because the heater will not blow any air, let alone hot air.

Someone please tell me that there will be a silver lining to this black cloud. Please? Because I am about at that point where I can just tell the situations to go screw themselves while I go out for drinks. Seriously.