Bugging Out!

Remember this?

Well, it happened again.

The water heater we bought yesterday doesn't work.

There was, of course, no way we could know this until the Kid spent nine hours on a Saturday taking the temporary electric one out and installing the new one and hooking up the gas.

So now -- da da-da daaaa -- we have no hot water.

I had to get up at the crack-o-dawn this morning (because, after receiving this news last night, I had too many beers to do it then) and convince the surly plumbing guy at Home Despot that he had to give me a free replacement for the faulty part, because there was no way I was paying the plumber to take the water heater out so I could return it for a working one, and then paying him to put it in again. Which the Kid would probably not have charged us extra for, but that wouldn't be right.

Surly Plumbing Man at first gave me all kinds of hairy eyeballs. Said he didn't understand what part we needed -- which the Kid had written down quite clearly. Said he didn't really carry parts. Quizzed me on what, exactly, wasn't working with the thing -- I played Girl (shrug and say "I'm just delivering the note. Where am I, anyway?").

Finally he took my note and went to check, leaving me standing there fighting the urge to peel all the stickers off the counter out of sheer, twenty-minutes-at-the-crack-o-dawn-with-nothing-to-do boredom. He came back and handed me this little tube -- no price tag on it, but it doesn't look like it could cost more than five bucks.

For this, he's giving me the hairy eyeball? Does he think I run this scam at Home Despots all up and down the eastern seaboard? Does he think if he searched Chuck (TFT) he'd find thousands upon thousands of these little tubes?

Anyway so we called the Kid and told him the part he needs is on the kitchen table (it's called a thermocouple, by the way -- or at least I hope it is, because that's what I got) and he should let himself in the back door whenever he likes. We feel bad about making him come over on a Sunday morning, but I really am going to need to shower before I go to work tomorrow, and the dishes are starting to pile up.

And now I gotta go, because this just flew by my head and I'm kind of freaking out:




It's a cicada, and I've no idea how it got in my office...