Nobody Wants To Be A Victim

I have been pretty busy lately with short deadlines at work and new nationwide tasks. Then there are personal goals of having all of the family member's eyes checked and new glasses for everybody. So, it was quite a welcome to see that it was going to be a rainy three-day weekend for me. So, I made no goals for myself. It was going to be a fun and relaxing Saturday afternoon listening to the rain outside and hoping that a few of my containers, three different sizes ranging from a container big enough to mix cement to a bin that the hospital sends you home with upon being discharged after delivering a baby, would fill up with rain for my garden. I watched some movies on my Tivo: Zenon Z3 and Geek Charming in order to clean out my buffer. But, ten minutes before the end of Amelie, which I have not seen since it came out in 2001, there was a knock on my door. Two old women walking their dogs told me that my water pipe was busted and there was visible water flooding on my lawn and on the sidewalk and down the side of the street to the gutter that led to the ocean.

At that moment, my heart sank. Questions circled my mind. What happened? I could barely seen the source of the water, hoping that the two ladies were wrong and that this was my neighbor's faucet. Strangely enough, my neighbor's house alarm went off numerous times yesterday, according to my husband, and some repair person came out in a van. I could smell the cutting of wood, although I had no other detail of the repairman's visit. I wondered how long the water was on? Why would someone do this to us? Why would someone do this to us on a rainy day?

Immediately, I called my husband to go check it out. Both water spigots on the exterior water pipe connected to the front of the house were on. Even though we have been living in this house in West Los Angeles for nearly 15 years, we have never thought that anybody would tamper with our water. Our house was egged when we made our own Obama poster and placed it in our window. We felt like a victim then. This country still has active haters. So, we couldn't understand why someone would have both spigots on. At one point, my husband speculated that it was a homeless person who wanted to have a drink of water. This still seems plausible since one side was attached to an old dirty hose and the other side the water runs out of the spigot.

Despite the on and off rain, my husband went to one local hardware store and was successful in placing a security device on one of the spigot but then discovered with my daughter, learned that the neither of the two items did not fit to sprinkler spigot threads. So, at 8:25 P.M., he was off to OSH. But after his return, he again learned that the thread was of an odd size. Therefore, tomorrow, he will have to return all of the pieces from both stores and then shut off the water in order take the part to Home Depot, hoping that there is a way to cap it off.

Meanwhile, he has been under the weather all day. So, the moral of the story is that even if one wants to have a relaxing carefree day to re-cooperate from a difficult week, one can easily be victimized in one's home and not know about it.