FROZEN!

Well, I don't know how many of you have ever experienced this, but I can tell you I wouldn't wish it on any of you (maybe on my worst enemy...). A week ago it was so cold that our three blankets on our bed just weren't enough--the only way we were able to sleep was to keep our electric blanket on all night. Now most of you know that I am fine with cold weather and keep my thermostat ridiculously low, but that doesn't mean that I don't have a thermostat and I do keep it significantly higher than freezing temperature. Unfortunately, with an old house, the furnace does not heat all portions of the house equally and, even more, does not heat crawl spaces. Also unfortunately the pipes coming into our house go through our crawl space.

On Wednesday, Jason got up at 5:30am to take care of Gavin and used the bathroom and got himself a drink of water--no problem. When we all got up at 7:30am, no more water. We called the neighbors to make sure that it wasn't the city water line, and sadly discovered that it was only our water that was no longer forth coming. By the time the plumber came at 4pm, I was really excited for the magical electrical warming tool that was promised to solve all our problems. But again it seemed our luck was running against us--he didn't have long enough cords to be able to hook it up to warm all our pipes, only the ones in the house! But he was still willing to try to see if it would help and happily charge us the $400 to do it and HOPE it worked! Too bad I was not willing to place that bet--but he wasn't too discouraged since he still got to walk away with our $40 service fee just for coming!

Now what were we supposed to do? Well, I cancelled the oil painting community class that I was teaching that night and Jason brought home a boat load of space heaters from work. We buried the exterior entrance to our crawl space with snow with the hope that it would stop the frigid breeze that was going through the crawl space and into the basement. We then turned up the house temperature 10 degrees and set up all the space heaters in the basement. Then we prayed. We also started looking up house rental options in the newspaper, as we were faced with the distinct possibility that we were going to have no more water for the rest of the winter! Miraculously, our prayers were answered and, just as we were falling asleep that night with nightmarish images of not having access to showers anytime in the forseeable future, we heard a distinct dripping noise followed by gushing water! You can't begin to understand the relief that washes over you to know that you have something as simple (and as taken for granted) as running water in your house! It did take another day before the toilet started flushing again, but even that came back. Sometimes you just don't realize how blessed you are until the basics are suddenly taken from you. And thank goodness for water (food) storage!

Moral of the story: try to take care of this type of thing yourself first before you pay a plumber for doing nothing!