I’ve never been any good at Geometry.  I barely passed Mrs. Winters’s geometry class in Bisbee High School, and having my appendix removed in the middle of the school year didn’t help my grade in that class, either.

Bill, on the other hand, thinks Geometry is cool.  He knows stuff about Geometry that I never heard about from Mrs. Winters.  For example, pi was invented so tax collectors could look at round grain silos and figure out how much tax was due.  But Mrs. Winters never really touched on practical applications for all those theorems.  We were simply expected to memorize them.

So this past week, our water bill for the previous month showed up in the mail–our bill for the 186,000 gallons that ran through our bedroom and bath when a pipe burst while we were out of town.  (We’re in the process of having leak detectors installed in ALL houses.  You can file this under Barn Door/Missing Horse.)

Let’s just say that 186,000 gallons is a whole bunch of water!   Bill immediately pointed that the amount of water was six times the water in the our back yard pool, for example.  And, because of his geometry skills, he also pointed out that 186,000 gallons is enough to cover one acre to the depth of six inches–deep enough that Bella would have to swim for it.  The shag carpet in the bedroom collected the water in one spot until it got heavy enough to drain down through the heat vents and ducts.  That’s how the water ended up in the crawl space as opposed to filling up the entire ground floor of our house to a depth something greater than six inches.  That would have caused a whole lot more damage.

So after a month and a half of de-construction, the house is finally coming back together.  The day before yesterday the last of ServePro’s heaters came out of the crawlspace.  Water that had wicked up into the sheathing of the house had cracked the outside stucco.  That has now been replaced.  It takes two weeks for stucco to cure under the best of circumstances.  A year where we’re running 29% above Seattle’s average rainfall for the year.  Needless to say, being wet, wet, wet doesn’t make for good stucco-drying conditions.  That part of the house is now repaired but it has to be tented for an as-yet-undetermined amount of time.  Today, workers are starting to lay new tile in the bathroom, and Bill and I need to go order the carpet.

Last weekend Bella and I went to see Santa.  It turns out he really is a Jolly Old Elf.  He helped pull me out of the home-repair doldrums.  And the guys who are here early and late, are doing their best to make my Christmas wish come true–that the house will be back together, good as new.

The tree is up.  The stockings are hung by the chimney with care. All’s right with the world.

But I can tell you, math major or not, is that you don’t have to understand geometry to know that 186,000 gallons is a lot of water.

It’s also a pain in the you-know-what!!!