There's Always a Bright Side

I said November was going to be a month of thanks, and I meant it. Sometimes that is a little more challenging than it should be, particularly when life throws those curveballs you don't expect. That's what happened to us this last weekend.

The weekend started off pretty normal, Riley got to spend it with Auntie Shay and Uncle Nathan, which meant a weekend of no plans at all for us.

Jesse worked his usual half-day on Saturday (he works every other Saturday until noon usually), and I finally got the office halfway organized. The day turned out beautiful which meant I ended up spending the afternoon riding, taking pictures of the cows, and ending it with a ranger date to check more cows. Those are the best dates!

Then comes Sunday... Sunday mornings are typically when I try to clean up the house before church and get laundry put away. As I was vacuuming, I went to move our curtain that hides the water heater and what did I find? Water. I found a lovely puddle of water right under the water heater...

In the defense of the water heater, we knew it would die sometime. It was about as old as Jess and I, and had been having issues with keeping water warm for a while... We just did not expect it to be that soon... So upon finding the puddle, off to the shop I went to let Jesse know the wonderful news. He came in and investigated it, jumped on Home Depot's website and started hunting for one that would work for us, and we prayed they'd have one in the store since we'd be headed there after church to pick up Riley and have lunch with Shay and Nathan.

Thankfully (See? There's always a bright side...) Home Depot showed several of the type we wanted to be in stock at our "local" store. So instead of spending the afternoon on the farm, he got to join us for lunch and we got the water heater and all the parts needed for installation, grabbed our grocery pickup order and off we went. Another huge blessing is that Jess is very savvy with DIY, and his brother is a carpenter. So the two of them spent a decent amount of time removing the old water heater, and then got the new one put in. I've gotta say, it is sure nice to have to run hot water first thing in the morning to jumpstart the water heater!

Moral of this story... While finding a leak under the water heater and replacing it were not on our list of things we wanted to do on Sunday, we can choose to be grateful that that we found it before it got worse, there was one in stock in the store, and we have such great family members that can help us in a pinch to get work done!