It has been an interesting few days. Fluffy is out of town on a photo shoot, so I'm playing bachelor again. Thursday, I called in sick since it hurt to swallow and I just felt nasty in general. But, it was also the day the the landlord's plumber came in... which resulted in so much drama.

Oh, and a bunch of other little things which I thought is interesting.

Start with the drama. We had a pipe under the tub that managed to get twisted almost in half. It worked, by the virtue of the hot water heater is set way too high but it also leaks slowly. My MythTV setup is only a meter or so away from this, so I requested it on general principle.

The plumber came in, said "OMG" and fixed it. Everyone was happy, there was cheering I think. The landlord also asked him to look at the slow drains, the toilet that didn't flush, and something else. The plumber bitched about "since you are here" tasks, but worked on those anyways, but when he went to turn the house water back on, bad things happened.

The decade old cut-off decided it finally had enough and broke. Just a bit one, about 5-10 liters of water per hour. This turned the $100 job into a $500.

But, when the plumber then went to turn the water off at the street, he had to unbury the cutoff that was half a meter under the ground and found out that broke years ago. This is the landlord's responsibility, which I'm sure he didn't want to hear. Fixing that requires a back hoe and a large chunk of my front yard.

And turned the $500 repair into a couple thousand dollar repair.

Right now, I have a steady stream of water pouring into my basement. Fortunately, right into the drain, but it is going to nail my water bill if it goes on for more than a few days. And it is raining so heavily that they can't repair it until tomorrow at the earliest.

I feel that some people have elements they don't have affinity with. For me, it is water. I've been flooded so many times and had more than my share of leaks, explosions, and sump pumps going out. Part of life, but it is amusing at least.

In other news, I switched my Moonfire Games email to use Google Mail (via their Google Apps) and cut my spam down in half. I also upgraded a forum, cleaned up some website contents, and started working on my commission. Not very far into it, but I did enjoy watching some horror movies nestled up on the couch, banging away on the computer.

I also tried to use the electric lawn mower that JW gave me. The first time, I got about a meter mowed before the battery died out. The second time, almost two meters. I let it charge overnight and hopefully I'll get at least four meters. Failing that, I'm going to deep drain it, full charge it, and go for eight.

I also sold my Zune on eBay. A decent amount of money, just need to ship it out. I'm going to pick up boxes on the way home.

Started learning how to rip DVD's. Now, for those who pay attention, I'm only doing this for DVD's I own but watch a lot of. You know, children shows and some of my horror movies. And anything Fluffy watches more than three times. That way, they can sit on the MythTV box as our own video on demand service. Just... takes a while for the first one, about 5 hours with the last run and I still haven't tried it out to see if the subtitles came through properly. I have a lot more respect for fan subbers of Anime after this; they actually put in different fonts on Slayers which is far and away beyond what I'm doing. I'm going with the .mkv file format, since it lets you have optional subtitles and alternate languages; just have to find a program that does it all for me instead of me fumbling with it.

And finally, my old boss paid me some money against our back pay from last year. About 1.4% of what was owed when I left. That brings them up to a grand total of 2.7% of my back pay in the 14 months since I left. Comes out to 1% every 5 months so far. :)