What we take for granted

It's been ages since I last posted and for that I apologize. With all the new changes and the Christmas holidays things have been a bit hectic. I had the great pleasure of visiting a good friend of mine in Austria for Christmas and after a short visit there I hopped on a plane to San Francisco to visit my sisters as well as the rest of my family who flew in from a few different places. A whirlwind tour, but amazing nonetheless.

Now that I'm back into my somewhat regular London routine, I've had time to realize how many different things are compared to back home. Nothing different in a bad way....just different. As of late I've noticed one thing in particular, and that is, it's really quite difficult to get things fixed here in London. Last week our boiler broke down and unfortunately myself and my flat mates have been stuck with having cold showers until we can sort out someone coming and doing a few repairs. Fortunately we have insurance on our boiler.....unfortunately it falls under "5 day a week" service during normal business hours. This of course means when the three of us are at work. Over the last week we tried to sort out how one of us could stay home until someone came and fixed it. On top of that, they can't even give you a ball park time that the engineer would come for the repair leaving us to wait for the entire day at home. We could get lucky and someone could show up early in the day, alternatively, we could wait the whole day only to have the engineer show up in the evening. Needless to say we're in between a rock and hard place.

Now comes the solution. Connor has a co-worker who has a friend (pretty far removed from someone we directly know of course) who is currently doing his dissertation and not working. We've collectively offered to pay this kind individual to sit at our house for the day, play our Wii, and watch our satellite TV while he waits for the savior of boilers to come and fix our hot water situation. After a week of without hot water and cold showers, I'd pay to have someone come in a put a new boiler in. Friday is the day so wish me luck that when I come home there is hot water running through the pipes!

Stay tuned to hear how it went!