We have officially survived Christmas week, but what a week it was.
First, the good news. The kids had a fun Christmas and thoroughly enjoyed their time off. I found that our new-in-2009 division of labor here at the inn did make for a less dreadful week for me. The weather was decent, with fresh snow several days during the week, although we had rain early on and high winds some days. And our guests were almost unanimously cheerful. That's a lot of good.
Now for the bad news. This was the week of facility issues. Here are the problems we discovered since December 23:
1. There was a crack in the fire wall of our oil burner which caused part of it to collapse, creating a pocket which resulted in an incomplete burn. And smoke. And, we thought, carbon monoxide. We discovered this on Christmas Eve, and the furnace repairman came out, removed the cracked firewall and said to keep an eye on it. We're still waiting for the replacement part to come in, but it has been burning cleaner.
2. Something is wrong with the draft in the wood boiler. We discovered this slowly, over several days of continuing carbon monoxide issues. It is now completely shut down (a fun process for Michael, that) and awaiting assistance from the company that sold it to us.
3. One of our leach fields appears to be failing. We discovered this on Saturday. Michael is still exploring solutions.
4. We had no cable at the inn for much of yesterday. Fortunately, the guests were understanding.
5. We had no Internet connection for most of yesterday. (This and the cable issue seem to have been caused by a power surge, although everything is plugged into surge protectors.) This is a much more critical issue than the cable, since people can book rooms online, and if we can't see what they are booking, it's easy for us to rent out the same room to someone who calls on the phone. I spent hours over the course of the day on the phone with tech support at our Internet service provider and our wireless provider, diagnosing the problem (the cable modem was not working) and trying to get the system up and running once the service tech connected the new modem. We got connection back yesterday evening, about 10 hours after it went down.
In the meantime, I've been coping by immersing myself in a TV show.
3 comments:
Any one of those things would be frustrating. Sorry. At some point you'll be able to look back on all this and say "remember when," but for now I know you'd probably like to just put a "fast forward" on your life.
Leach fields? *raise eyebrow* That sounds positively gruesome.
Ahhh, I was thinking of "leech." :) I'm going to guess that "LEACH" refers to Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy, yes? (Thank you, Wikipedia.)
Teri, leach fields are also known as "septic drain fields." As it turns out, the problem was a clogged pipe that Michael was able to get fixed for around $200. Thank goodness.
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