When It Rains (or breaks) It Pours!

Ah, where do I begin...I think today would have gone better if I had never gotten out of bed. To start off I was 30 minutes late getting Mollie to school. I'm not late, I hate to be late. It took me an hour to get the critters fed and watered this morning. The hoses were all froze up and I ended up having to haul bucket after bucket to fill the stock tanks. Then it took me forever to load all the teacher gifts, ect. in the truck for Mollie's Christmas party. We finally made it there and the kids had a nice little program for the parents and a party. I had planned on going to the city afterwards to get the Christmas shopping done before the weather got nasty tomorrow, luckily I had to stop back by the house on my way out of town. I ran in the office and checked Jerry's fax and there was one from the water company to call asap. I dreaded calling, it had to be something wrong...boy was I right. She told me that they read our meter Monday and we were at 65,000 gallons. I said that sounded like a lot but I didn't know what our normal usage was but did know our water bill was around $50.00 or below so what was this bill. She blew me out of the water (no pun intended) when she said $734.00!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(yes I had to put a lot of exclamation marks there to emphasise how awful this was). To make a very long and boring story shorter I checked all the hydrants for leaks or soggy ground and found nothing. A friend sent a friend over to help me shut off the main and when the water man came out he check all the hydrants and found nothing. However, he had noticed an icy spot in the driveway which was odd, being that we have 3-4 inches of snow. He probed it and said to get a backhoe out and tell them to start digging there. Needless to say, I topped all the stock tanks, filled the bathtub and a couple of buckets before shutting the main off again. We have no water and hopefully tomorrow the guy Jerry hired to come with a backhoe shows up and finds the break without having to dig up our entire yard. I'm sure the lady at the water co. thought I was a real weirdo when I couldn't hardly talk on the phone because I was too busy crying. It was so overwhelming having no water, a huge bill, Christmas, the kids coming Friday and Jerry's family Christmas here on Sunday. I'm praying it gets fixed fast! A $734.00 water bill and a backhoe bill......Merry Christmas Jerry and Stephanie!

(Oh, by the way, it's just not our week, Mollie's cat died and we lost a baby donkey but like a friend of mine always says, "better in the barn (and the yard!)than in the house")