Back to the daily grind

I'm not sure that my life is really exciting, or at least that I make it sound that way, but sometimes some interesting things happen to me. Sunday, in the early morning, I got on the ferry to head back from Wrangell. I got on the ferry and went to sleep (woohoo 3AM). I woke up about 8:30 so that I could get ready and everything for our 9:30 arrival. I doesn't take me an hour to get ready in the morning, I just like being up and ready to go. Well about 9:15 they make an announcement that it's probably going to be 10AM before we dock. There was another ferry docked that was having mechanical problems so it couldn't leave. At 10 we were still out in the channel but starting to go around in circles. It was announced that it was going to be another 15-30 minutes. There were several more announcements made that sounded exactly like that. I finally stepped off the ferry at 11:15AM. The rest of my travel Sunday was very uneventful. I got home and walked into my house and my oil heater wasn't working. I checked all the usual things....nothing. I called Siri to see if I could borrow an electric heater since it was 44 degrees in my house. Her son Anthony dropped it off and tried to see if there was anything he could do to make the heater start. We checked the oil tank, I have plenty of oil. We tried a variety of things with the heater, still nothing. I called my landlord. 'I'll come look at in the morning.' I think it was about 50 degrees when I went to bed. Luckily I have electric heaters in my bedroom so it wasn't too cold in there.
I got up and went to work yesterday, during lunch I got a phone call from my landlord. 'I think you're out of heating oil.' Not possible. I told him that I had checked it the night before and had quite a bit. So they checked to see if there was water in the filter. Well they drained the water and cleaned the filter. Still no heat. When I got home my landlord and someone else were working on the heater. I guess it was leaking some oil and maybe the pump isn't working right. I don't know what else is wrong with it. Basically as long as the exhaust to a different heater is the same, I'm getting a new(er) heater. Thankfully my landlord brought over another electric heater to run in my house. This morning when I woke up it was about 60 degrees, that a lot warmer than the 45 degrees on Monday. I hope that they can get the whole heater thing figured out. Till then my house smells like heating oil.
School yesterday went surprisingly well. It is nice to be back in the swing of things. I don't think anything really exciting happened. Two weeks until the first semester is over, not that the second semester is going to bring any real changes. I guess someone counted up the days of school that were left and as of today there are 143 days. That seems like a lot and the next break isn't until spring break. It's going to be a long haul getting through January and February but that's how it goes. The kids have the 19th of this month off for teacher inservice.
We also got the reminder notice that our regular ferry will be getting serviced starting next Monday. Mumble, mumble, mumble. The Inter-Island ferry, or IFA ferry, will be running "in it's place." Our ferry runs twice a day Thursday through Monday. So it makes two runs to Ketchikan and two runs back to Metlakatla. When we have the IFA ferry it makes one run from Ketchikan to Metlakatla at 11AM and goes from Metlakatla to Ketchikan at 2PM. Simply put, it's not possible to get to Ketchikan and back on the same day via the IFA ferry. We are going to have to do this for at least the next 3 months. I guess I'm not going anywhere. I'll deal with the ferry thing for spring break when I go somewhere but that will probably be the only time I'm going to leave the island, unless I float plane it. The joys of living on an island in Southeast Alaska.
Well I'm off to start another day.