Close shave with water

Cúpla mí ó shin, the municipality announced that they were replacing the water meters in the area where we live, so would we please check that the valves were in working order so the water could be turned off. Well, I checked it and thought that the tap went dry when I turned the valve, but when the plumber came to replace the meter, the valve no longer worked and he had to leave the old meter in place as the water couldn't be turned off.

We were told to fix that valve within a couple of months and let them know, and this morning another plumber came, a personal friend of jlms's, to replace first the valve and then the meter. After he was done, he switched on the water again, and immediately water started to flow onto the floor from a different place in the laundry room. He turned off the water again and investigated the leak. It was a welding seam on another pipe that was just bursting, completely unrelated to the work he had been doing. If turning the water off and then on again hadn't just provoked it to burst, it would probably had happened within a few days or at most weeks, flooding the entire house if we hadn't been at home.

It felt a bit like being hit by an ambulance. Phew.

Playing around with Google Maps

I thought I would map out where I lived and went to school when I grew up, and created a Google map. While doing this, I realized that if I were ever to write my memoirs - bad idea, they would be of scant interest to others - I would probably use a map as a starting point. Poring over maps of places where I've lived or been to I remember all kinds of things I thought I had forgot. Interesting.