Yesterday morning the temperature in Lawrence, KS was about 1 degrees farenheight. My house is over 90 years old. These two things do not go together well.

I woke up to find out that I didn’t have any hot water; the cold had taken out some critical plumbing under the sink. Being me, my first thought was not “what if the pipes burst” or “oh this will be expensive” but “I have to get to work.” What can I say – I’m a company man. I shut off the water to the house and called my co-worker Matt to see if I could use his shower. Thankfully, Matt’s house is not 90 years old and had plenty of delicious flowing hot water.

After some coffee, Matt and I got in my car and carpooled to work. The commute is 33 miles each way, and while most of it is on K-10, a 70 mph road connecting Lawrence and Kansas City the last 3 miles is a drive through Olathe, the suburb where my work is located. As we approached work, I noticed that my car was having trouble idling at stoplights. This escalated to actually stalling out when idling and the check engine light coming on as I was approaching work.

The car is now at the dealership, and they don’t know when they’ll have time to look at it. There is a leaking pipe behind my downstairs shower which requires breaking tile to fix, and there is no time to fix it before the holiday so I’m abandoning the house.

I’m a man without a home or a car, and I’m leaving it all behind for California.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.