Today when I woke up, I could hear the wind whistling around outside, and I *really* did not want to get up and let Luna out. She doesn't like physically going outside by herself, because she is a giant fluffy baby, so to get her to go potty, someone has to accompany her outside. and first thing in the morning, that's me. Today was (hopefully) the coldest day of the year for us. It was -7 not counting the wind chill. Silly me, I thought having rambunctious kids stuck inside a small house all day would be the worst thing I had to deal with today!
After I dealt with Luna, I got something out of the fridge and remembered how the kids had been telling me that the milk never seemed all that cold. We had kept turning down the temperature, but as I stood there with the fridge open, nothing really seemed all that cold--definitely not 33 degrees, which is what it was set on! So I got out my oven thermometer, and lo and behold, the fridge was actually reading 52 degrees. Ha! No wonder left-overs have been spoiling more rapidly than I was expecting! It is a testimony to how fast we go through a gallon of milk (one a day) that it never spoiled, lol. Fortunately we have a spare fridge in our laundry room, and with how cold the weather is, our garage can serve as a walk-in fridge right now too. But still--that was unsettling. It seemed like a newer fridge, not that that means anything anymore.
After making muffins, playing with Luna outside some (brrrr, but no walk at least), helping people with math, etc., I headed up to take a shower about 10:30. I was shocked to discover no water at all. The pipe had frozen?!? Our shower in the master bathroom doesn't have the faucet on the outside wall, so I had not even given it a thought when deciding what faucets to leave dripping the night before. I was much more concerned about our kitchen sink, and the sink in our laundry room bathroom. Plus the bathroom stays really toasty warm at night when I close the door into it. It's a small room with a heat vent. Of course, these sorts of things happen when Bob is TDY, and in fact, he is in DC for the week, so we had to have many quick phone consults instead of him being able to come home and deal with the issue.
So I got out my hair dryer and started blowing hot air at where I thought the pipes would be. When I needed to give the dryer a rest, I went down to the basement to check out the little room under our bathroom. It's the room Nathan and Luke sleep in when they are home, and we call it "the cell" because it's really small and narrow. There was a panel on the ceiling in that room already, conveniently located under our shower. Hmmm. We had assumed they had a leak or something, but perhaps the previous owners also had to deal with frozen shower pipes?? Anyway, I left the panel opened, dug up a space heater from the garage, and put it in there to try to really heat up that space. Obviously not much school was happening from my perspective, but Grace and Anna did help the 3 little kids do their math and phonics, and the 3 girls did most of their stuff, so I guess the day was not a total loss.
My parents stopped by, and my dad pulled a ton of insulation from the hole in the ceiling. It was really cold behind the insulation--but that's where the pipe disappeared to. I had realized that the top level actually overhangs the bottom by about a foot or 18 inches, so that was where all our pipe issues were. We used the hair dryer in that space some more (I fried my hair dryer at this point, and so that was the end of that. It was about 10 years old, so it had a good run.) I heated up a "rice bag" and wrapped it around the shower head, since that was the only place I could see to wrap it. I kept running upstairs every 15 minutes or so to reheat the bag.
Finally in the middle of the afternoon, I ran upstairs and yay! I heard the sound of running water! My joy was quickly overcome with horror, as I saw that the shower seemed to be completely clogged, and water had filled the bottom of the shower and was pouring over the sides, flooding the room. Ack!! I turned off the water, yelled for kids to bring me towels, and started mopping up everything. We have a tiny shower, so it did not take long for it to fill up and overflow everywhere. What a mess!
I immediately thought that the shower must have been clogged with hair, although really that made no sense at all. I had taken a shower just yesterday, with no water rising up on my feet, so it would have been quite unlikely that in the space of one day, the shower completely clogged with hair! But I wasn't thinking too clearly at that point, and Jonathan and I started poking around in the drain with a knife and a coat hanger. Unfortunately, nothing happened except we stirred up whatever gunk and hair was down there, but the water did not drain. Not one tiny bit. Clearly our drain pipe was also frozen. Is that even a thing?!? I had never even heard of that! I hoped that the water would gradually thaw the blockage or something, but after a few hours (with me pouring out cupful after cupful of water into the sink, trying to make the water level go down), still nothing was draining. And I was still accomplishing nothing, schoolwise, even though I was supposed to be doing AP biology with Caleb and Jonathan. Sigh.
So my dad stopped by again, this time bringing his shop vac to suck out all that nasty water. Then I heated pots of water on the stove, and he poured hot water down, a cup at a time, while trying to snake the drain. At first he could only go a few inches, but eventually he could go 1 1/2 feet. It took a few hours, but thankfully, he was able to get it draining again. Hallelujah!
We also looked in on the basement bedroom. The beds were wet, as was the carpet in some places, but we really couldn't get a good feel for where, exactly, the water was coming from. There was a water line on the ceiling, but it looked more like where water had flooded the bathroom floor upstairs than anything else. I moved the space heater to the floor so hopefully it would dry.
After dinner I ran to Walmart to buy another hair dryer, and then I finally took a shower. After I dried my hair, I ran back down to the basement to check on the heater. I'm so glad I did, because we were not much time away from an electrical fire! I had used an extension cord because the one plug is in a very inconvenient place, and that was clearly not the right thing to do. The cord was soo hot to the touch, and it smelled terrible in there! Ack! I ran the cord outside to cool, and left the heater off. Good grief!
While my dad was over the second time, Verity picked out a book for me to read to her. It was a book by Richard Scarry called Mr Frumble's Coffee Shop Disaster, where Mr. Frumble pretty much broke everything he touched, and it was a huge mess. I have never related more to that book, and I have never been more glad to have a day end! I am praying tomorrow is a better day. A less exciting one, for sure.
"Because of the Lord's great mercies, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." Lam. 3: 22-23
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