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Wednesday, December 03, 2008
So much for a quiet night
All I wanted was a relaxing, go-to-bed early night last night. Had a really crappy day at work and thought we could have a quick dinner over Happy Hour, then come home, maybe finish the last stack of my international Christmas cards and then head to bed.
Of course it didn't play out that way. When we got home there was an overwhelming smell of oil in the whole house so Mike went to check the oil tank downstairs (we have a furnace that's powered by oil - very common here) Of course there was a leak and already some oil on the floor. It was leaking pretty steadily as well and the tank was about 3/4 full so we had to do something. That meant the rest of the night was spent on the phone with the furnace/oil supply company, then the fire department, the police and a Hazmat clean-up team. The tank apparently was too old (it might be the original tank for the house ... Mike's great grandfather built this house so you can imagine the age) and rusty to be fixed, the whole bottom was going to give away sooner or later, so the tech from the oil company wasn't able to patch it. That meant that DEP (Department of Enviromental Protection) had to get involved and we had to have a Hazmat clean-up team come out to pump out our oil tank so it wouldn't leak all over the place and start contaminating the soil. All this was happening really late at night so of course one of the neighbors called the police because of the noise. It's not like we really had much of a choice in the matter. Oh well.
Anyway I got to bed about 2 am so I only managed to get about 4 hours of sleep. I don't work too well on anything less than 7-8 hours so please excuse any typo's or grammatical errors in this post.
Of course this is not the end of all this either. Now we have to deal with Homeowners insurance to get some of our money back for that Hazmat team to come out (they wanted a $2500 deposit just to come out - jesus!) and of course we need a new oil tank. In the meantime they have our furnace hooked up to a small 5-gallon oil container but of course that won't last long..... The joys of homeownership.
Mail Update: No letters have gone out since the last update. Received letters from/still owe replies to: Charles/TN and Jessica/DE.
Posted by Hanna at 07:51 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Bummer - I'm glad that it's getting fixed, but sorry that your Christmas present may be a couple of big bills and an oil tank.
Try to get an nice long nights' sleep tonight.
Cas
Posted by: cassie-b | Dec 5, 2008 3:20:51 PM