A house sitting mishap

Well January went by pretty quick. Considering January is usually the worst month of the year for people living in this terrible climate!
It was one of the best winters that they've had here lately. I say was one of the best winters, because winter weather is almost over for us...4 weeks from Monday, we head SOUTH.

The winter has gone by pretty quick. We started housesitting here on November 1st, and so we're 3/4 of the way through it, and it's been a great experience.

There has only been one little glitch during our time here...

The people who own this house do a lot of their own gardening, and they work very hard to grow organic vegetables. In the fall, they spent a lot of time doing canning and freezing of the produce that they grew over the summer. And they knew that they would be out of the house for 4 months, and not returning until the end of February. So they made arrangements with us, to housesit and look after things while they're away.

Well one day, I wanted to do some work on Sherman, who is parked in the driveway out front.

And so I had to run an extension cord out from the house to the motorhome to get some electricity. I found the outdoor electrical outlet that is on the front of the house, plugged in the extension cord, and went to work. But there was no electricity coming out of the other end of the cord!

So the first thing I did was to go down to the basement and check the electrical breakers. Some of them were already off and I clicked through a few trying to get that outside outlet to work, but it made no difference. Eventually I found out that the wires for that one outlet aren’t even connected, so I went back to the breakers and put everything back to the way it was. I figured the ones that were off, were off for a reason so I put those ones back to that way. Or at least I thought I did. I even checked all the lights in the house to make sure everything was working again, but I never thought to check the freezer. It simply didn’t occur to me, and I thought I had double checked which ones to reset back to the off position.

And so one day, Ruth went down to put something of ours in the freezer. She opened it up, to find the freezer at room temperature, with everything in it gone bad.

Turns out that one of the breakers was off, and as soon as I turned it back on, the freezer has been working fine ever since.

I felt horrible as I was pretty sure it was me who had caused all the food to go bad. I didn't relish the idea of telling our homeowners, whose property we were supposed to be looking after, that I had ruined their freezer full of food. But, it had to be done, so eventually I broke the news to them. But they were really good about it...far better than I expected them to be, and it's all history now.

Ruth has been busy restocking their freezer, even though they said not to worry about it. These things happen, and life goes on...

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