32,000 flushes

Typically I enjoy paying my bills. Perhaps I'm somewhat of an oddity, but I find it very therapeutic to send all of my money away to happy people in other states that provide electricity, water and gas to my house as well as the occasional insurance bill to continue driving my cars. I know what it's going to cost and I always know what the bills are going to be. Sometimes I'm a little bit surprised but for most part not. I set up our budget once again when we returned to Texas in September.

My brother had left a note on our master bath toilet saying that the bob had broken and he had shut it off a few days earlier. I was happy to find it shut off and proceeded to buy the parts that I needed to fix the problem. I learned a valuable lesson that day. NEVER buy anything that is not factory sealed from Home Depot. I think they take customer returns, and put them back on the shelf with out even looking at the contents. I bought the first part and found bits missing, got rather upset because I couldn't remember which of the 500 Home Depots I bought it at and bought another one with out taking the other back. I got it all fixed and was quite happy with out acconplishments for the day. At last I could have a toilet to myself once again. Happy days.

Well, since then we took over one of the kids bedrooms as an office while waiting to get a real office, rebuilt the website after hackers took down our server and spent an arm and a leg on having a part fixed on my air conditioning. All in a days work for the self employed home owner. Then it happened. I got the mail with zeal like I always do. There was a bunch of crap that went into the recycling pile, and a couple of bills. One was a bogus bill from an internet company trying to tell me I owe them money for advertising my website when they have never done anything for me and are just hoping that I'm stupid enough to send them money and the other was the water bill. Yes, the water bill. Sure, to people who have been living in their house, taking showers, washing clothes and watering their lawn it wasn't that much money. But I had only been living in the house for two of the weeks that they were billing me for and it seemed a little high for that. I did the math and figured out that we had used about 5-6 times as much water as usual in our two weeks back. Kind of odd. It was about 45,000 gallons more then we usually use. It turned out that that had run though the toilet after the bob broke before my brother shut the water off. On our toilets thats about 32,000 flushes. It's kind of a bargain if you think that it only cost about $80 extra.