In the afternoon when we woke up, almost 24 hours after our arrival, we found that the van we needed to use to buy groceries had 1 slightly flat tyre and 1 dramatically flat tyre. Now, back in Wellington I could have hopped on the bus, called a taxi or simply walked down to the corner store of the centre of town. Not so in the urban sprawl of this town. Taxis have to be pre-arranged the day before, buses don't even service the area and there are no footpaths along the roads we would need to walk to get to any store. We ended up ordering Chinese food because they delivered and because I thought that would be slightly less painful on my sensitive stomach than pizza. It wasn't much. It was ridiculously amusing to me, however, that Chinese food here does actually come in those white cardboard boxes with the wire handle just like in American Sit-Coms. It also came with 5 complimentary fortune cookies; apparently I "will make changes before winning" and I have been advised to "Do the right thing because it is right. Have the courage to face it.".
We ended up making a quick store run just before the store closed at 11pm because the future-in-law got home and let us use his car around then. The next day we set about moving all the analogue TVs out of the room we have claimed as an antique-free zone and moving fiancé's computer into the aforementioned room so that it could actually be used (there was no room to stand in front of it - let alone sit - in his old bedroom come antique storage room) and then we were told not to move anything else until future-in-law was home to tell us where it was to go so we stopped.
Again, it was hard to wake up at a reasonable hour the next day so today I got out of bed just as future-in-law was heading off on a trip out of town for 2 days. It just so happened that this was the exact same moment that the pump which brings water from the underground well that provides the water-supply for this house decided to break. We have had no running water for over twelve hours. Now, the fact that future-in-law is out of town isn't the worst part of this. Tomorrow is July 4 - USA's "Independence Day" - which means, effectively, that we will be without water until Tuesday 5 July at the very least. More than likely, all of the service people who we could call to come out to fix the pump are away on holiday out of town. We've left messages for two separate companies, at least 1 of which advertises 24 hour service, and have heard nothing back for almost 12 hours. I shall never take running water for granted again.
At least I can credit my "ghetto" (in the words of fiancé) upbringing as useful for helping us through this situation - we'll ask for some buckets of water from the neighbours tomorrow and do the good old bucket flush for the toilets then boil some for doing the dishes that are piling up and washing ourselves a bit. One of the things I was looking forward to about living here was that I would have improved living conditions. The Fates, it seems, are not without their sense of irony.
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