On March 27, 2017 my hot water heater died.
The Friday before, a friend at work was telling me about some new research she read concerning heavy metal elevations in the human body as a result of the build up in hot water tanks. I listened to her rant and rave about it, resolving herself to a life without taking a bath ever again, just super short lukewarm showers. How she would get cold water from the tap, not hot water to boil for cooking, etc., etc..
As I sat there listening to her, I was thinking to myself how grateful I was that I always hated taking baths. That hate might have saved this 47 year-old body from some heavy metal poisoning!!! I laughed inside at the irony. I also prefer about a 5 minute shower. In and out. I prefer that method for lots of things, an odd trait for a woman to have but it's the truth. Be done and be gone! 🤣
My husband, on the other hand loves taking long baths. We both work M-F/9-5, he has a physical job, I have a desk job. Every night, without fail, we get home around 6:00, he'd put the coffee on, go into the bathroom and start running water for his bath. Once the coffee is brewed, he gets his cup and a book and a couple of joints and heads to the bathtub. I don't see him again until about 8:00 when he comes out and decides to eat something. We're all creatures of habit but I always watch him in amazement...
So, still while my co-worker is talking, all this goes through my mind and I wonder if all that bathing might not be good for his physical body? He constantly complains of soreness which I attributed to his job. But who knows? There is likely some truth to it.
The following Monday, March 27, I'm woken up by some vicious swearing coming from the bathroom.
We lost our hot water. 🤔😒🤔
I laid there for a while, thinking about how fixing this was all going to go down and slowly getting annoyed with myself. Not because we lost the hot water but because I'll be the one expected to fix it. And that's a pain in the ass for multiple reasons.
First off, we live an hour from anyone that services these things. I wouldn't change that for anything, I love where we live. That said, it also means I'll have to take a day off work to be here when they come. Again, no big deal because I'm salaried and hubby is by the hour. Makes more financial sense for me to stay at home.
Secondly (and this really should be firstly) is that our house is a disaster. It's been a frustration for the 15 years we've been together. We're both lazy. The difference is that I have an added layer of concern about what people think. So while he looks around and doesn't get annoyed by the mess, I look around and get panic attacks at the thought of anyone stepping foot inside this house.
So, as I lay there in bed, listening to him curse, my heart is sinking into a gutter of despair at the thought of having to spend two days cleaning just so I can allow a guy into my house to fix a water heater.
And then, I had a thought... I'm not going to do a damn thing to fix it. If he wants hot water, let's see how long he can go before he decides to pick up the phone and get it fixed himself. And I resolved myself to go without for however long that might take.
I started ticking off in my head all the things I use hot water for. The conversation with my co-worker just the week before informed me of things I didn't even know. Like dishwashers for example, don't use hot water from the tank! The water is heated by an element in the dishwasher itself!!! Makes perfect sense, but I never knew that. 😊 So we don't need it for the dishwasher. I could easily heat water up on the stove in a pot, take it to the bathtub with a cloth and sponge bath and use a cup to rinse my hair. I've washed my hair in a sink a lot when I was young, it's not much different AND I just got my hair all chopped off short anyway!!! So, no problem there. Same goes for pots and pans, just heat a pot up and throw it in the sink. We have cold water. Not much of an extra step really. Lastly, the laundry. We've been doing cold water washing ever since we moved in 9 years ago. Not even an issue.
I settled that part quickly. Yes, I can do this. I willingly accept the challenge. However, I do have one more very important element to add to this frustration equation and that is money.
At that time, we didn't have much. Why does that matter, you ask? Because we don't rent our water heater from the Power company, it came with the home we got 9 years ago. And 8 years ago, we had an element die in it and discovered at that time that we couldn't get one from the Power Company anyway because the wiring wasn't right for their heaters. We'd need to fix the wiring before they would give us one to just charge monthly to the bill.
I knew for 8 years that If we needed a new water heater, it was going to cost us about $800, which we actually didn't have. And we didn't have it because I decided in January that we were going to go on a cruise for our 15th wedding anniversary. It's even the Crystal Anniversary for crying out loud! I planned it for weeks and finally settled on a 4-night cruise from New Orleans to Cozumel and back. I planned and booked the cruise and flights for under $3000 back in January. This would be our first big trip in 15 years, since our Honeymoon. I had until August 11 to pay it off. We go in October. Our Anniversary is October 11, same as my parents, bless their souls. When I booked the trip, the room that was suggested was Deck 11, Room 1111. Not fucking kidding. It was screaming at me to say "YES!!!". So, I did. 😎
That morning, laying in bed, I still had more than $2200 left to pay that trip off, with time rapidly running out to do so. The thought of needing to come up with another $800 immediately made me want to puke.
In that moment, I had to decide between our Anniversary trip and fucking hot water.
I chose the trip.
Fast forward to today. For the first time since March 27, I had a hot shower.
99 days 😍
I took the day off work to be here and all is well. Happy Independence Day it is. And we're goin' on a Cruise!!!! 💨💦💗
Now, allow me tell you how it happened.
Five days after we lost our hot water, my workplace got into some pretty heavy hot water of its own making... Even though it had nothing to do with me specifically, I was part of it because I work there and everyone felt it through all levels, all the way to the Premier. Actually, work had been insane for well over a year anyway, so this was just fuel to the fire. And it was crazy all the news surrounding it, it's still on-going too! It's a fun story for anyone interested in whistleblowers and government cover-ups and investigations. Seems to be going on everywhere, even in little ole New Brunswick. 😜
But as a result of this, in late April, we were offered overtime. That, dear friends, is a miracle in and of itself. I am a property assessor. We don't get overtime. Given the situation we are faced with at work, it was the wisest decision they could have made and I intended to use it, not just to help the work situation but also to pay off my trip!!! 🤓
So, I made hubby a deal. He cleans, I work and we start smoking rollies and e-cigs to try and cut back on cigarettes. (They cost $20 a pack now, it's ridiculous.) I did some maths and figured I could have the trip paid for by the end of July by working an extra day a week and, if he was willing to continue roughing it, we could attempt to forego the water heater replacement until after the trip was paid off. We were already over a month into the adventure by that point anyway and it wasn't so bad. My power bill even went down some compared to last year! And the place wasn't any cleaner than it was on March 27. Obviously his bath habit wasn't enough to motivate him into gettin' er done! 😆
But, I digress. 😇
Now, around this same time (May 30, to be exact), I logged onto Bittrex. You see, I previously fucked up royally in my crypto investing. I sold 400,000 SolarCoins far, far too early and converted them to Ether at about $7 ETH at the time and then sold those far, far too early to pay off bills that crept up over the last year. I sold the remaining to go towards the trip right before they took the huge run up. So I was feeling pretty low about the prospects of abundance, and that's just the truth. I had failed miserably and I judged myself harshly for it. I couldn't even look at crypro for months, it made me sick with regret. Right in the gut.
So, you can imagine my surprise to see that I had 0.2 BTC sitting there! Spread out among a handful of currencies I bought on there for cheap and forgot about!!! 🤗 But mostly it was STEEM! From a post I wrote last summer about Troll Whispering. It made $286 at the time and I was SO excited!!! I didn't sell much of that STEEM apparently and that post suddenly became worth alot more to me.
All of a sudden, I went from, "Fuck, I'm gonna have to cancel this trip... 😭" to "Holy shit! I might just be able to make this happen! 💝" I buckled in, forgave myself for the failures of the past and resolved to begin again. I put together a small portfolio of cyrptos, got sucked back in to researching some of the new ones and getting caught up on where everything is at. I even uncovered a personal Mandela Effect that spun my head for a few good minutes. I got lots of great information from the Cryptocurrency Collectors Club that I was invited to join right before it became a closed group. 😊
SolarCoin had gone up too and a few people that bought them when I harassed them three years ago asked if I could cash them out and I charged a 10% fee to do it. I found all the websites I had forgotten about, discovered a 0.5 THs lifetime mining contract at Genesis Mining going to a Bitcoin address I completely forgot about and another ETH mining contract I don't even remember buying. Thankfully, I was anal then and kept records of everything. It took me a while to locate the wallets where the funds were being sent but I found them! 🤓
I gathered all of this coinage up and started managing my little portfolio. I do have the letters CFA after my name so I was just brushing up on skillz I already have and it was fun. I was finally having a blast. I read about SingularDTV and got the Brave browser when I read about BAT. I'm using it now! I could go on and on. The short time I had taken my attention away from crypto, it appeared to bloom suddenly before my eyes!!! Putin requests a meeting with Vitalik? ETH in Singapore? Zcash? DASH? ICO's? Everything was blooming, in so many more spaces and cracks than what I saw even a year ago, yet it's been there the whole time. I bought a total of 13 different cryptos that tickled my fancy in some way or other.
I felt so excited about the future because I realized, with complete clarity, it's already here. I am merely being afforded the opportunity to watch it play out precisely because of the path I took in life to arrive at this point. I don't know the circumstances or specifics of how it will play out though, none of us do. It's not W6. I believe we are in the realm of potentials right now, this is new. And it can be beautiful. I didn't really believe that was possible for a long time. I thought you had to fight for it, struggle for it, earn it. And you do. But not quite in the way I was led to think. That's all. 🙂
I took the time to send my brand of positive energy to each and every one of those crypto petals that revealed themselves to me. Every day I took an hour to visit them, trade them a little here and there. The next thing I knew, my little portfolio was worth $2,600. Just enough to pay off the trip and get our hot water back.
A week ago Saturday, I sold all of my holdings and paid off our trip. And today, we have hot water again.
For that I give thanks to time, overtime, crypto, sacrifice, desire, allowance, Faith, Hope and Curiousity.
Honestly, going without hot water for three months sounds insane. But it wasn't even difficult. You'd be surprised how easy it is to get by without it. Sure, we had cold water and electricity too. It's not like we had to build a fire and keep it going just to have hot water for cleaning and bathing. It was pretty simple...
I will tell you what was hard though... Going without the luxury of a nice, hot shower first thing in the morning. I am more than grateful to have that back. It is pretty fucking nice after all. 😉
As for my crypto portfolio, I have started again. I had an expense cheque pop into my bank account Friday so I bought an ETH, sent half of it to Bittrex and spent Canada Day deciding on what was going to go into my new little portfolio. I chose 10 that I liked, WAVES being one of them. And today I'm surfin' that wave. May it be the first of many.