A Frustrating Thanksgiving

November 30th, 2010:

Now, my Thanksgiving started out pretty solid.  Felicia and I drove a traffic-less 70 miles from our house in Burbank to meet up with the rest of the family for a little holiday photo session in Riverside.   Any day that starts off with pictures and family is a good one, and I had plan to write a post about how thankful I am for my family, friends and everyone in my life.  But, unfortunately, life had other plans for me on this particular Thanksgiving Day.

Now (to bring you all up to date), I own a condominium in Riverside which I have had for about 5 years, and it has always been a rental property.   The day before Thanksgiving the tenant called me up and said his heater wasn’t working (in the middle of some freezing So. Cal. nights), but I also knew that recently one of the neighbors killed the gas to the unit, which killed the pilot light on the water heater.  I figured the heater needed reset as well.  I told him I would swing by there real quick after our shoot.

I showed up with a Leatherman and a lighter, figuring it would be fairly simple.  I never would have guessed the condo had a hot water/radiator based system that is linked into the water heater.  It actually is quite a clever, energy saving system, but it doesn’t have a pilot light.   I pulled out the heater manual and read in the troubleshooting that if the heater hasn’t been used in a while I needed to spin the water pump shaft to free it.  Fairly simple if I had any tools.  Just shut off the water, pull 4 screws, spin the pump, replace the pump with 4 screws and turn the water back on.

Needless to say it didn’t turn out this way – the 30 minute process ended up being 5 hours, with lost seals, sheared off screws, driving all over Riverside to collect tools and parts, scrambling to find a open hardware store on a Thanksgiving afternoon, and, all the while, receiving calls asking when I would arrive to eat Thanksgiving dinner.  Also, because it was a sealed water based system, the house would have no water until I could get the heater working again….

The “simple” project took 5 stressful hours, and I arrived to Thanksgiving, dirty and irritated, to a table of leftovers.

Sigh…. at least the pictures are cool.

My sister and Brother-in-Law.

Grandpa looking charming as always.

Mom and Step-Dad.