management not responsible for loose analogies

Better Half and I are in something of an interesting predicament at the moment… Thanks to her job, we have a fully-furnished temporary apartment at a rather nice complex. Additionally, her new employer moved all of our effects across the country – no small cost. However, to move ourselves, we elected to fly as opposed to drive… lower fuel costs, and it took considerably less time, though we were unable to embark upon another thoroughly interesting road trip (all road trips are, by definition, interesting). The real hitch with this plan, however, is that we were limited to one checked piece of luggage, one carry-on piece of luggage, and one backpack apiece. Sure, we could have checked another bag for $25 (Thanks Delta, you twits!), but we are cheap.
So here we are, in our quaint little temporary apartment, and we do not have a whole lot of stuff.
Unfortunately, this apartment has a very small water heater – about 38 gallons. To add insult to that injury, the shower head the apartment came with was, in no way, shape or form, a low-flow model. I am willing to wager about a full gallon went through the thing a second. So, the first thought that came to mind for extending our water heater’s usefulness was to procure and install a low-flow shower head. Great. Except I could not get the current shower head off to save my life. At all. Period. Whoever put that thing on there did a damned good job of it. And, flying cross-country as we did, and limited by idiotic weight restrictions as we were, neither of us thought to pack a tool chest in our luggage.
One trip to Wal-Mart, a low-flow water head, and a nine-inch clamp-jaw wrench later, I was able to remove the old shower head and install the new one… Of course, as you can guess, I used the wrench for all of half a turn getting the old one off and half a turn getting the new one on – figures, does it not? But, without that wrench, and spending the $10 for it (bleh – especially when the new shower head only cost that much itself), I could not have made those half-turns, and we would still be dealing with a quick-to-empty-the-tank shower head.
I guess a similar situation happens with carry firearms… they are not cheap, getting licensed to carry them is not cheap, and the whole process can be rather time consuming and stressful… but when you need one (and you will probably only need it for a very short time), you really, really need one.
Now that the shower is fixed, I think Better Half and I are headed to the DMV tomorrow – after all we need to get new licenses, and register my car in its new home, and I need to move my Florida CFWL permit to a more-local one. Hopefully Tennessee’s turnaround time will be as fast as Florida’s was.