Holy crap!

I just got called into my bosses office. Year-end bonus time. I won't divulge any specific amounts, but he wrote down the number, and my reaction was "holy shit!" He had prepared us for bad news, given the economy and so forth, so my expectations were really low, I guess, so I very pleasantly surprised. And in as much debt as we're in, every bit helps.

Things have been crazy busy lately. This weekend we cleaned up the house more.
Sunday was the Superbowl, and we had friends come over to watch the game. It was a lot of fun for everyone to get together. Everyone seemed to have fun, and it was a good feeling to have people over for the first time in our new pad.

I emptied the spa and read about spa care, refilled it and added a bunch of chemicals and whatnot. I think I have a handle on how to keep it going. We went in last night and it was heavenly. There are little massage jets that are really nice.

Our new application has been rolled out at work, and things are going pretty well with that. Last time was a nightmare, and we had to take it back and fix things, but now things are going a lot smoother. This morning there was an unrelated emergency which has kept us all hopping. And it would be easy for it to seem like the new app was at fault, but luckily it wasn't. In fact, it caught the errors and caused further bad things to happen, which is good, but it's easy to blame the messenger. But I think all is well now.

Last night we had a little plumbing emergency. The shower was dripping a little, so Diana went to turn off the water firmly, and the hot water handle sort of broke free in it's fitting. There was water coming out of the shower, and the handle just sort of spun freely in its fixture. I, being a wannabe handy kind of guy, decided to unscrew the fixture. Before I knew it, the fixture blasted off the wall, and hot water was spouting freely out of the hole in the wall. It was quite exciting. I'm glad I took the precaution of learning where the water main was. That info came in pretty handy. So I turned off the water and checked stuff out. I'm not quite sure how the whole thing works, but looking into the hole I see a threaded socket that the handle once screwed into. The socket is a little corroded, and actually has a hole in the side of it. The thing that came out of the wall was corroded, and must have broke when Diana twisted it. So we have a plumber coming out this afternoon. What I'm HOPING is the case is that it's an old fixture or valve or something that can be replaced easily, and NOT that there's a fundamental problem with the entire plumbing system. We'll see what he says. It was a pretty funny little adventure, though.

Ugh. Another work problem. Gotta gooooooo...