That was surprisingly easy

[tigertoy]

Ray the plumber called me at 3:30.  I told him I could meet him in 45 minutes.  I was home in 40 minutes and he was waiting for me.  Once he was able to get to the pipe, he discovered that the pipe had not actually broken.  The clamp that holds the inside the house part onto the through-the-slab part had failed.  Because it's wedged in behind the water heater, it was a pain in the butt to fix -- but relative to jackhammering up the floor, or re-plumbing the whole line from the well, a trivial problem.  So I have running water.  The only oddity is that the "cold" water is blood temperature -- I guess it must be hotter than heck in the underground well house, and the water has been standing in there for 10 days, so it's reached equilibrium.

But the main news is that I have running water again, and the secondary news is that, instead of having to try to figure out where I'd come up with a couple of thousand bucks for the repair, my finances actually look better today than they did two weeks ago -- because the credit card bill for the Minnesota trip came in, and it was a lot less than I'd been budgeting for.  So much less that the car repair and the plumber call together are less than the bonus.  So I don't need to squirm about buying a new hard drive -- which I really need because the ones I have are full of photos.