The Stereotypical "House" Problem

I am in my final week at Andrea and Kirk's house after several extensions at my temporary job. Several months ago, before my extensions were known, they made plans to let their friend Aaron live with them for the month of June. He is a high school teacher and is going to work at his old undergrad summer job at NDSU. This means that I politely gave up my bed to its rightful tenant and planned on spending my last four or five nights on an air mattress. I went to the movie "Sex and the City 2" last night and found that Andrea had kindly blown it up for me when I returned. I put some sheets on and went to sleep. At 2 am I woke up on the floor with the billowing sides of the mattress surrounding me! Apparently it has a leak. I struggled to free myself from the mattress and then relocated to the basement couch (It is the couch they had in their old apartment and I spent many nights on it when I would visit them for the weekend during law school. It is an old buddy!) This is certainly a sign that I have overstayed my welcome!

You might be wondering how that seemingly pointless story connects with the title. The title is referring to the fact that at the moment when four people are living here instead of three or two the water heater has broken! Water heater problems always cause, at a minimum, inconvenience. They also escalate and make everyone's lives miserable. At the KD house we had a few water heater fiascos during my years of residence. My sophomore year something went wrong with the hot water in the kitchen. We had to follow health codes pertaining to the sanitization of dishes. Since we couldn't sanitize dishes we had to use paper dishes until the problem was fixed! We all had a paper cup with our name on it that we were supposed to try to reuse! A story is still told about how a resident sat on a paper glass of koolaid after she tried to perch on the table after a night of drinking. Hilarious. My junior year the water heater broke and we had to resort to showering elsewhere. Some girls went to the Wellness Center and I headed over to the familiar freshman dorm and its endless supply of hot water to shower on Andrea's floor. When I returned I found that the hot water was back. Sigh. Bad timing!

The water heater at Andrea's has been acting strange for awhile and tonight, Aaron, Andrea and I had cold showers after our evening runs/rollerblades/days of work at the ag experiment station. Brrrr! A repair man is coming tomorrow. He is the second they have spoken to after the first gave them an exhorbitant price quote. It is a pain, but all a part of having a house, I guess! It is their first homeowner related snag, so I guess they have been pretty lucky so far. I wonder what ours will be?