{"id":42395,"date":"2023-02-09T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-09T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thelandmark.com\/?p=42395"},"modified":"2023-02-09T06:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-02-09T11:00:00","slug":"a-wise-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/2023\/02\/09\/a-wise-choice\/","title":{"rendered":"A wise choice"},"content":{"rendered":"
Kristen B. Payson <\/b>
\n Editor<\/i><\/div>\n

Has everyone thawed out from the icy polar vortex that froze our eyeballs the moment we stepped outside this past weekend? Yes? Good.<\/p>\n

I was fortunate not to lose power, other than a 20-second blip on Friday. And thankfully, the pipes held.<\/p>\n

My mother died in 2020, just as the COVID lockdown started \u2014 her death was not due to virus \u2014 and she left my brother and me a small sum of money each. Nothing stupendous. My father, who died in 2013, was a millwright in the company that later became Rockwell International. Years after he retired, the company rose to space shuttle fame, but he was not in on that high-falutin\u2019 development. He just fixed things, and he didn\u2019t make a lot of money. Mom worked as a secretary off and on for the schools, but nothing long-term.<\/p>\n

Knowing how tight things were growing up, and how they scrimped on everything, it was really hard to spend any of my inheritance. I did a few small things, like updating our phones and having a tree removed that was dragging on the roof. I even had new gutters put on, since they were pretty bad.<\/p>\n

But bigger expenditures stalled me. We desperately needed the bathroom redone, as the tile around the tub was literally falling off the wall, and the tub was tilting due to a leak that had rotted the corner of the subfloor, which I didn\u2019t know. When the contractors discovered that, I was very relieved that I had not decided to do one of those tuband- surround covers, which wouldn\u2019t have revealed that.<\/p>\n

As part of the project, I looked at the plumbing. A plumber had told me about seven years prior that my ridiculously soft old copper pipes were living on borrowed time. The pipe over the washing machine dripped on me as I loaded and unloaded it. Things stored in the furnace room were not safe from drips. Things were damaged. But because it was a chunk of change to fix, I borrowed more time for those pipes. I sweated every cold snap.<\/p>\n

But the bathroom project was the ideal time to do it, so I took a deep breath and committed. Believe me, I sweated that decision, hoping my father would approve of the choice.<\/p>\n

This past weekend, as the furnace hummed and the pipes held, I finally let out the breath I\u2019d been holding.<\/p>\n

I could see him nodding in his rocking chair. A man of few words, I could hear what he would say.<\/p>\n

\u201cYep, that was smart.\u201d Thanks, Dad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has everyone thawed out from the icy polar vortex that froze our eyeballs the moment we stepped outside this past weekend? Yes? Good. I was fortunate not to lose power, other than a 20-second blip on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":96545,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_gspb_post_css":"","_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devcherryroad.com\/news2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}