The other day, we woke up to find trucks parked in front of our house. Big, yellow, heavy-duty trucks. Because our neighbors are having their driveway completely redone, we didn’t think another thing of it…that is, until a backhoe started digging up our front yard. My husband went outside to find there was a gas leak, though no one bothered to tell us. Good thing, considering I probably would’ve wound up in a panic, packed up the two kids and the dog (I would’ve left the fish), and ran from the house. The pipeline workers assured us it was okay to stay, and since they had to shut the gas off to work on the line, I felt pretty safe. That was at Noon, day before yesterday. At 9:30 that night, the gas company finally came out to turn our gas back on. Of course, and I say “of course” because we have the WORST luck of any people I know, when they went into our basement, they found FIVE gas leaks coming from the pipe in our house. Not that I don’t want to know there are five gas leaks in my basement, but we had no control over this. This all started when the backhoe folks showed up that morning. Next thing we know, the gas company tells us we have seven days to fix it or they’re shutting it off. Nice.

Since then, we’ve had two trips by a repairman and three from the gas company. We’ve had gas for approximately 10 hours, most of which was overnight. I do not know how people lived without hot water coming straight from a faucet. My kids have had to take cold-bordering-on-lukewarm baths the past two nights (only bordering-on-lukewarm because there was a little bit of water left in the hot water tank). It’s no wonder women used to wear those big, long, dresses with lots of layers. It was to hide their stench.

In addition, my husband noticed this morning that the pipeline people, who had so delicately torn up our yard, also crushed the drain running from our TWO sump pumps to the street. Those sump pumps run all the time, so we need that drain. The pumps are the result of five different trips made to our house by a waterproofing company to fix our constantly flooding basement. We recently found out that was due to a broken water line in our front yard. We had it replaced a couple of months ago. The flooding caused a mold problem that actually DID send me into a panic and made me pack up the two kids (I left the fish AND the dog) and run from the house. We’re going camping this weekend, and I think I’m going to feel like I’m living in luxury compared to this place.

I can not stress this enough people…buy a brand new house.

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