So this past Wednesday, Shannon said that there was an employee from the Des Moines Water Works, and then on Thursday, as I was about to head towards the shower, another Water Works employee knocked on the door and said he wanted to listen to some pipes inside the house, so I let him in and directed him to the basement and he listened with his device and headed back outside and listened some more and back inside.  The conclusion of all of this is that on Saturday we got a letter from the city that stated that we needed to replace the service line.  When I called today for further details today, it looks as if we need to replace from the stop box to the house (from research, I've found that it's water main with an off pipe the stop box, stop box to house, simple enough, Denver Water Works had some nice diagrams).  We also found that this was our responsibility.  So I had remembered hearing some where some number of how much it cost and for some reason I had in my head the number of $10,000.  Now we don't have $10,000 laying around (we should have an emergency fund with way more then that, but we're working to get there, but aren't even close to that).  So we were under the assumption that we'd have to shoot the gains we've been making at debt reducing in the face.

We just got the first bid in, and it's well under that $10,000 number and broken into a couple of parts (waterline to stop box, one part, stop box to house another) and together they'd be around $6,000.  Well we don't have that either, but we do have the money to cover the stop box to house line...though just barely (we could cover the stop box to the waterline too, but not both).  What this does mean, however, is that the external painting of the house is put on hold for another year.

Houses are expensive.  It seems that every time we get settled and say, hey, We've done the (in order of living here):

• Water heater (~6 months after I moved in)
• Various plumbing things (the previous owner thought he was handy, I feel we have been slowly replacing everything he's done)
• Roof Patch
• New Roof
• New Gutters (immediately after new roof)
• Gutter repair (there were large chunks of ice that fell off the house that just bent the gutters out of shape)
• Dishwasher (this was actually quite the deal)
• New HVAC system (heater, A/C, exchanger, humidifier)

And that doesn't include the painting that we've done.  It's getting tiresome.  Every year or so, yields something expensive.  The only year were I feel like we haven't had at least something going on housewise, was last year, and that was a year we had several unexpected expensive vet visits (which is why we didn't paint last year).  So...what else can go wrong?  Haven't we pretty much hit all the big things?

Personally I've been fighting an unexplained iron weirdness.  This is leading to anemia.  In a little over a week, I have the join of getting a procedure more then 15 years before you would normally start getting it, to make sure that I don't have polyps or worse.  It has been affecting my ability to get out of bed, my general mood, and my ability to pay attention.  I've been doing my best to counteract the affects I think it is having, but I cannot be sure that I am adjusting enough, or if it's due to a larger amount of stress.  Either way, I've been taking iron supplements, and just take a moment to look out what a general side effect of that is.  My family has a history of poor iron uptake, polyps and cancer in that area, though mid-thirties is a bit early for that stuff to show up.

Oh well, I feel unburdened, and that's quite enough bitching out of me.