Law of Visitors

Mercy Ships obtained another ship called the Caribbean Mercy. It was a medium-sized ship, somewhere between the Anastasis and the Good Samaritan. It was coming to visit our area and they needed somewhere for the advance team to stay, which was a couple and their daughter a little older than Alexis. We decided to put them up.

Their visit was memorable for two reasons. Their daughter had a very funny way of expressing hurt/disappointment/anger. Any time it happened (which was a lot) she would loudly exclaim E-I-E-I-O!, as in Old McDonald Had A Farm. The other memorable thing seemed to be part of what we called the Law of Visitors. At that time in our lives, it seemed that whenever we had visitors, something disastrous would happen to the house. 

One day, someone was walking downstairs and noticed that the carpet was wet. You know that sinking feeling when you instinctively know something like this is going to cost you a significant amount of money? This time it was the hot water heater. It had rusted through on the bottom and flooded the first floor.

Normally, a landlord would have to take care of such a thing. But when we moved in, we had arranged to pay $50 less in rent a month with the caveat that if anything happened up to the difference of $600 a year, we would be responsible for it. This was helpful if nothing happened but not so much if it did. So this was on us.

Space in a small townhome is tight, so they try to build them very efficiently. Accordingly, the hot water heater was in a very difficult place to reach. Fortunately, it was downstairs so the whole house didn’t flood but it was under the stairs, to the side of the small washer/dryer area. To get to it, you had to take off the pocket doors to the washer/dryer area, pull the washer and dryer out, pull the panel off and contort your body into the space. 

So in the middle of hosting this family in the winter, we had no hot water, the washer and dryer were out in the middle of everything, the carpet was pulled up with fans blowing and we kept hearing E-I-E-I-O. Of course, the plumber wasn’t the smallest man in the world. You can imagine his look when he saw the space he had to work with. But he was a kind man, didn’t take advantage of us and soon everything got back to “normal”.

EIEIO!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more