I woke up this morning with one of those Today Is the First Day of the Rest of My Life feelings.

You know the kind I mean. The type of day when you’re going to steer your little cable car right back on the track of where it’s supposed to be heading. Start eating vegetables and whole grains again instead of Doritos. Scrub the bathroom, get the receipts together for the taxes, pretend the internet hasn’t been invented yet. Be the kind of writer who is On Schedule once again.

After some deliberation, I decided to start with a bath, which turned out to be a huge misstep. Because it was while I was rinsing my hair that I heard a horrible rattling noise from the depths of the house, where the gremlins live, and then realized there was no more water coming out of the tap.

This is scary when you have a well. Especially a well that you don’t understand or know the exact location of or have ever thought about for longer than two seconds on any given day. I will spare you the madcap details of the day, except to say that at various times it involved a plumber, a guy from a well pump company, a trip to the town hall to look for a site map that might indicate where the well could possibly be located on the property, many phone conversations with friends who have had wells go bad…and lots and lots of talk about the 8 to 10 inches of permafrost that is located on top of our well, wherever it might be located.

And trips to the store for bottled water.

The whole day I felt like any minute someone was going to say something to me like, “Ohhhh! I know what this is! This is because you hit the little red button when you should have hit the little green button! Now all you have to do is just go back and re-hit the button, and your well is going to be fine again!”

Never mind that there are no red and green buttons, and no magic tricks to try. People just kept saying things to me that involved the words  “bad foot valve” and “thousands of dollars” and “too bad the ground is so hard.”

The good news–the only reason that I am not right now lying on the floor banging my fists and crying–is that tomorrow morning at 8 a.m., an optimistic man with his own personal backhoe is coming to our house. He is perhaps a lunatic, but he believes that he can dig up the hard ground, find the top of the well, and that we can get the thing open and replace the foot valve, whatever that is…and go on to have a happy life, for mere thousands of dollars.

It’s only money.

As my friend Sandy (who once spent months searching for her well with a shovel) said today, “So, which is it? Would you rather have money or running water?”

Right about now, getting ready to brush my teeth in a paper cup and with nearly every dish in my house dirty, I’d go for some water.

I’d also like the heater to stop making that VROOOOOMING noise that it’s making when it turns on or off. I just know it’s heard from the well that we’re in free-for-all season.

And next…well, I’d really like 2007 to improve itself. Show some real effort here. We’re exhausted with all this stuff.