Counting life’s little blessings

Eric Sheehan

One hot afternoon in June, I arrived home to the unpleasant surprise of a warm house.

To make things worse, the central air unit was running outside.

The next morning, I called the heating and cooling guy to come have a look at and the prognosis was bad.

It was dead and a replacement would be in the $2,000 to $4,000 range.

“Not a good time of year for that,” I replied, adding, “I guess there are a lot of people without AC that would be happy just to have a dry place to sleep.”

Now most people would have just ordered a new unit, but, as you may have guessed, I’m not most people.

To help you understand this predicament I’ll share the following story with you.

A couple years back we bought a faucet from Craigslist.

Why Craigslist, you might ask?

It doesn’t play into the story, but I would guess it was to save a couple bucks. Sure we didn’t price comparable faucets, but it seemed cheap considering how shiny it was and as a bonus, it had a spray nozzle.

As I was saying, we got this shiny faucet, with a spray nozzle, from Craigslist.

I’ve changed out faucets before, it’s not in my Top 10 favorite things to do list, but I sure didn’t want to pay someone to do it either, so as soon as we got home I went to work.

• Plumbers Tape: 4

• Basin Wrench: 4

• New Supply Lines: 4

• Shut Off Every Valve in the House: 4

The job went off without a hitch.

The shiny new faucet, with spray nozzle, was installed so I brought the wife in for the grand reveal.

“It looks incredible!” I recall her saying as she walked over and twisted the handle.

It was immediately apparent, however, that the water pressure wasn’t good.

Okay, it was pretty bad.

Shrugging, I decided that I might not have gotten all the valves completely open again.

DRUM ROLL … no change.

I wouldn’t call it a trickle, but it wasn’t even enough to make the fancy spray nozzle spray.

“Well, it looks nice,” my wife offered, trying to perk me up. “And I’m sure it’s enough pressure to do what we need to do.”

“Great honey, thanks” I muttered as I went through in my head every possible reason it wasn’t working right.

I checked and double checked everything.

I Googled it.

I Youtubed it.

I even asked a plumber I knew.

“That is peculiar, I can’t imagine what it might be.” he said. “If you want, I can fit you in a month from Friday.”

I resigned myself to the fact that we were just going to have to live with the low-flow faucet for a while.

But then the faucet got progressively worse, and thern even worse.

I am talking like three to four minutes to fill up a coffee pot bad.

This went on for months. My wife would say. “years.” and possibly be right.

If anyone complained about the trickle of water, I would note that some people spend half of their day getting water to drink and they are happy just to have water, adding that we have four good faucets, not counting the tub.

So, really, the kitchen sink should just serve as a reminder for us to appreciate our abundance.

A few months ago, on a whim, we got a new faucet at the hardware store for 50 bucks.

Thirty minutes later, we had Niagara Falls-like flow in comparison and the spray nozzle actually sprayed.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure our new found convenience caused us to take for granted the ease of our lives so karma decided to provide another reminder of our blessings.

Some people would be ecstatic just to have a fan.

Needless to say, it could be years before cold air blows in our house again.

I guess the moral of the story is to be thankful …. hat you don’t live in our house.