it could be worse

Due to an unfortunate series of events (none of them our fault, all of them out of our control and which I am not at liberty to discuss here) we awoke on Wednesday morning to find ourselves without running water. Happily I had washed my hair on Tuesday night and Blaine could shower at work so we went about our day, this included Blaine notifying our landlord (the City) of the issue. Although they hoped to have things fixed by Wednesday night that was not the case. We agreed to stay the night in our house and to move into a hotel if it was not resolved the next day. Blaine had to attend to some phone calls and budgets for his other job so came to bed just after midnight... only to be woken by a pager call less than 2 hours later. I stopped by the firehall on my way to work at 8am, he was still up at the fire scene. My blog is not about firefighting, suffice it to say that an apartment building burned to the ground and some 29 families were displaced. I felt a little churlish booking into a hotel because we had no running water when these people had no home at all.

Hotel rooms and residential housing are in short supply here and sure enough when I phoned the Capital Suites they didn't have any rooms available on Thursday night. Not because of the fire mind, the residents of 4100 Road to Nowhere were housed in the Frobisher Inn which is the closest hotel to them. Late in the afternoon I got a call from the hotel letting me know that there had been a cancellation so there was now room at the inn. The wind was blowing a gale, Blaine was still on the fireground and taxis don't take dogs. My knights in shining armour were Linda and her husband Craig who drove me home then came back 45 minutes later to pack me, the dogs and our bags in the car then drive us to the hotel where they wouldn't let me lift a thing (except Johnny Cash) and even took my bags to the room - thank you once again guys :-)

After settling in I walked the dogs on the beach by the coastguard station and then went back to our suite to cook dinner. By 8:45pm Blaine was still not home so I put the puppies' boots on and we walked up to the firehall to drop off a room key as the hotel front door is locked at 10pm. At the hall dispatch informed me that Blaine had just left, sure enough when they radioed him he was just arriving at the hotel. We walked back and Sage was very very happy to see daddy after his gruelling 19-hour day. On his part Blaine was very happy to remove his turnout gear, eat some healthy food and soak in a hot bath. The city hopes to have our water issue resolved 'soon'. The Capital Suites has room for us until March 31, then is fully booked for a week. Every room in the city is full the following week for the April 3-6 mining symposium so please all keep your fingers crossed that they fix it asap. We don't know when we will be home or if we will have internet access at the hotel so we may or may not see you online.

As the title says, it could be worse... we do still have our house and contents... we are just a little tired and frazzled.