By dry I don’t mean alcohol free (it was that too) but water free. Dominica and I woke up this morning and discovered that we had no water. None. Nada. Thank goodness today is a holiday and neither of us are scheduled to be anywhere all day today.
I got up and went down to the front desk to make sure that they were aware that we had no water. 1180 Raymond Blvd. is pretty good about knowing that there are issues but if you don’t let people know things and they never get fixed you really have no one to blame but yourself. So I went down to find out the skinny on the situation. It turns out that there was a pump issue that caused a bunch of safeties to go so the water system has shut down. This explains the degraded water performance last night and the resulting outage this morning.
I walked over to Subway, the one on Broad Street that is right next door to us, to get some breakfast. I was the only person there. Newark, apparently, really shuts down on the Fourth of July. Even Dunkin Donuts was closed according to my neighbour who went out searching for food. McDonald’s and Subway were the only local restaurants reported to be open this morning. Fortunately Subway has the egg and cheese subs which are quite delicious.
My goal for today is to play lots and lots of Dragon Quest VIII. Dominica has a bit of homework left to do so she is working on that today. Her class ends on Friday so today is her last chance to get everything done. Unfortunately she discovered today that one portion of her class is unavailable to her today because it only unlocks once other people have submitted their work so that they can collaborate. This is an important part of the class. But, as of tonight, Dominica is the only person to have worked on the final section of the class leaving her with only two worknights left until the course is over with no way to complete her work. Of course, this means that no one else is even close to completing their work but they can complete at any moment as her work has unlocked that section for them. So it is actually easier for other people to finish the class than it is for Dominica because she did the work and attempted to complete the class first! Now she has to squeeze in time to watch for other people’s submittals to see if she has any chance of completing at all. Online classes, supposedly designed to allow for schedule flexibility for working professionals, with ridiculous time scenarios like this cause real problems. If she worked an evening job there is every possibility that the class would wrap up while she was working her final shift and even though she was the first to “complete” she could be left as the only person not having submitted all of the work.
Our water came back on this morning but the hot water has iron or something in it and it is really disgusting. We were supposed to run the water for fifteen or twenty minutes to get the sediment out and then it was supposed to be okay. No such luck. Whatever got into the tank really got into the tank. We ended up running the water in the bath all day – that is about twelve hours! And after all that time the water never cleared up. It got better but it never got clear. Nor did it ever get warm. By late evening it was tepid but never warm. So no one in 1180 got to take showers last night or today. Ewww.
Min finished her homework and then finished watching the first season of <em>Veronica Mars</em>. Oreo slept all day like he has never slept before. He was totally exhausted. There was a birthday party at daycare yesterday and he got so worked up that he had to be put in time out. He gets so excited about these parties that he just loses control. Today he migrated back and forth between the futon where he could watch Dominica working and the loveseat where he was snuggling with me. It was a good day for little dogs.
For dinner we ate leftover Chinese food (General Tso’s Bean Curd) that we had ordered in last night. Boy is that stuff good.