Yeah. Right. I get this great idea, at 3:15 AM last Saturday night, that I’ll drive down to the house in Eastham (Cape Cod), open it up for the summer, air it out a little, maybe walk along the beach, then take a nap, and I’ll be back by like four in the afternoon.
So I get down there at 5:00, roughly, and the house is freezing. I mean, really cold. We leave the thermostat on down there just a little so the pipes won’t freeze, and something was definitely wrong.
And the damn magnet we had for the oil company is not on the refrigerator anymore.
So I spend the next hour on my cell calling different oil companies, in the car (because you can see your breath in the house) and eventually track down the right company. They don’t call until around 8 AM, at which point I’m told, it’ll be at least two hours until we get there.
I said screw it, ran down the the Hearth & Kettle on 6A, and had an enormous breakfast. Then I tipped the waitress $23 on a $17 meal — what the hell, it’s Easter, right?
When I get back, I lounge in the car again for about an hour until the guy shows up. Nice guy. I take him downstairs, he attacks the fuel pump, he fixes it quickly, informs me that the fuel pump was filled with air that he had to bleed out, and now it’s working just fine (“The spark is wicked huge!” he told me).
Now I spend two hours waiting for the house to warm up. The house does not warm up. Around noon, I call my father. He insists the house should be warm by now and calls the oil guy back. The oil guy calls me (as my cell phone is just dying — the regular phone service is still off down there) and tells me, “That house is wicked cold. Wicked cold. Trust me. It’s gonna take like six hours to heat up.”
So I waited two more hours…then figured…what the hell…and drove all the way back.
I did get to see the sun rise at Skaket Beach, though. Har!