Shower the People

Let me explain...yesterday morning when I was in the laying in bed not wanting it to be Monday, I hear Meredith struggling with the shower in the bathroom. I pop out of bed completely expecting to be able to solve the problem with a little elbow grease and some manliness, and seconds later walked away defeated and concerned. When we turned on the bath faucet and tried to turn the knob for the shower to start, all we heard was a rattling/vibrating/sputtering/knocking noise from inside the wall, and no water was coming out of the showerhead. All I could picture at that moment was a leaky pipe expelling massive amounts of water into the wall's interior (made worse by not knowing what the heck was wrong). So Meredith agreed to take a bath instead of a shower. This posed a major problem for me. Last time I took a real "bath" I don't think I was old enough to know my name. I decided instead to use the guest room shower, which turned out to have the same exact problem! I was almost to the point of walking out back and showering with the gardenhose, but there was enough of a trickle from the showerhead to clean up. Going back to the bath thing, if any man tells you he just took a "bath", you should immediately be suspicious of his character. Men were not created to desire a "bath". With that being said, it turns out the problem with the showers was that there was air in the water lines, so I turned off the mater main, ran all the faucets/showers in the house until they ran dry (also purging said air in pipes), turned the water back on, and magically, the showers returned to their previous mediocrity of water pressure. Better than a "bath", I guess! In my careful planning of this process, I turned off the water heater in the outside storage closet to alleviate the risk of burning it up if it were to run dry during the experiment. Well, guess what I didn't do yesterday? TURN IT BACK ON! So this morning Meredith had what I can only presume as a lukewarm shower at best. After she showered, I proceeded to turn it back on and let it warm up. Folks, you have never felt a shower this cold! I stuck my bare leg in expecting a hot blast of shower water and was welcomed with arctic sub-zero water. It's kind of like ordering a Coke from a fast-food place, taking that first sip and expecting Coke, and getting unsweet tea. An instantaneous shock followed by immediate disappointment. I got dressed, ran outside into the 33 degree temp, and flipped to breaker back to "ON", and enjoyed my ice shower. Oh yeah, shampoo also doesn't wash out very well at that temperature. I can only pray that my next few mornings aren't so eventful

Moral of the Story: Don't take plumbing or hot water heaters for granted, you will miss them when you are without!