I was planning to share my New Year’s resolutions with you today, but this attempt was derailed by the arrival of my plumber, who is currently the most popular person in our house.

I’m sure you’ve never had a plumbing emergency, but we had one last night, when Cheetah Boy woke me from a nap to announce that the bathtub faucet would not turn off.

“You have to come and see this,” he insisted. Now, usually when he’s insisting that I look at something, it’s a TikTok video of someone having a painful fall, or other online hilarity involving personal misfortune of strangers. But he wouldn’t go away, so I grudgingly got up out of my comfy recliner and waddled into the main bathroom, where I was able to confirm that, yes, the tub was rapidly filling with pouring water and the tap would not shut off.

We had to shut off the main water valve to the house, which fortunately we only learned how to use last week. (Yes, I’ve lived in this house since 2006, but I’m a slow learner). I called my plumber, Jeff, whom I knew had been in Santa Barbara for Christmas. I knew this because we had another plumbing emergency only last week, while he was gone. Sigh.

Have you ever just wanted to go live in a cave? There are no plumbing emergencies in caves.

Anyway, luckily, Jeff was on his way back from Santa Barbara so he said he could come over this morning and replace the stuck shower valve. He’s here now. Which enables me to breathe a huge sigh of relief.

I never had a husband, but fortunately I have Jeff to do many things that I imagine are in the realm of husband-hood, like snaking out the bathtub drain when the kids have stopped it up yet again. And fixing the electrical box that caught on fire when we plugged a space heater into it. And replacing the gas water heater when it finally died.

The nice thing about having Jeff is that he fixes things when I call him,  I pay him and then he goes away. He doesn’t demand a beer, or lie beside me snoring like a chain saw, or insist that we should buy the cheaper dryer. He’s like having a husband but only the good parts. He does sometimes lecture me, usually about making the young people who live here clean their hair out of the drains. But if you’ve ever had young people living in your house, sometimes you just have to give it up to Jesus, because they don’t listen to you.

I mean, what do you do with 20-somethings? I can’t threaten to take their phones away. I can’t physically pick them up and carry them into the bathroom to clean the drain. I can’t take the doors off their rooms. Once they reach that age, my only weapon other than my soft, gentle voice is the nuclear solution: Kicking them out. And, while I am occasionally tempted, I am not going to evict the kids over hair in a drain.

I know some of you are becoming irate right now, and you’re going to write to me and tell me how I can make those kids obey. “Make them pay for the plumber. Get a switch off the tree and beat them. Change the locks.”

Well, some of those things may work, but at this point in my life I just need to eliminate all stress. And it was stressful when my mom beat me with a switch, so I suspect it would also be stressful to beat someone else with one.

It was stressful to have no water last night, since we had to keep it off until the plumber came this morning. I very seldom have the urge to clean anything, but the odd thing was that as soon as the water was unavailable I was overcome with the irresistible desire to wash dishes, clothes and everything else in my house.

As usual when this happens, I lay down until it passed, but every time I walk past the pile of dirty dishes in the sink, I feel a twinge of guilt.

You really forget how crucial running water is to your life until you don’t have any. I especially appreciate this after being in Kenya, where many tiny hamlets have none, and have to rely on water wells that kind strangers had built for them. We live in luxury here compared to much of the world, and then we gripe about it.

My most memorable water moment was when my brother and his family and I had been car camping deep inside Canyonlands National Park, where you need a four-wheel-drive just to get in there. The campsites were gorgeous, at the mouth of a red rock box canyon with almost no one around. But it was cold and rainy. We didn’t want to fight our way back out of the canyon through the mud without even being able to hike. (Slickrock is named that for a reason). So we sat under a ledge for two days until the rain stopped and everything dried out.

We were able to hike and it was magnificent, but I was filthy and cold by the end of the trip. We stopped at a restaurant for lunch on the way home, and I went into the bathroom.

Where there was…..hot water! I turned the hot water on full blast, soaped up my face and hands, and I don’t believe anything ever felt so good in my entire life as getting warm and clean in that bathroom. It was like going to the Ponderosa on TV’s “Survivor.”

I never again took water for granted. And, hopefully, by the time you’re reading this, I have some.

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