My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

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

End of a Very Long, Very Good Break

Well, our Christmas break is officially over now--everyone has gone back to school, even the college kids! 

We left to drive to VA Dec. 27, and we were there for about a week.  A whirlwind week of social activities!  I went out to lunch Friday with my friend Lynnea, and then out to breakfast Saturday with my friend Rabia.

 Saturday night was an open house at the MC's, welcoming Isaac home and celebrating his birthday.  I got to catch up with a ton of friends I might not otherwise have been able to see, and it was so much fun.  I was hoarse the next day from all the talking!

 Isaac's party was the first time that Nathan's girlfriend Elena and Luke's girlfriend Elissa had been able to meet each other, as well as a lot of Nathan and Luke's friends. So fun!

 The younger friends had play dates too, like this one Monday morning.  Luna had a play date here too, wrestling around with Denver the whole time.

 Monday night was New Year's Eve, and we went over to the L's house for our usual New Year's Eve party!  We brought Telestrations and Code Names, both of which were well-received.  The Telestrations game was hilarious, as always.

 We counted down at 9:00, like we usually do.  Verity was not scared at all this year, and she participated fully in the noise, lol.

 It was so fun to have all these guys together again. 

 New Year's Day we headed down to Richmond, where we spent the afternoon with Nathan's girlfriend's family at their beautiful house in the woods!  We helped them eat leftovers from their own VT bowl game watching New Year's Eve party the previous day, and we really enjoying getting to know them.  Here Micah is showing off his newly-learned cornhole style.  Luna was also invited for this get-together, and she had an absolute ball running around the whole time with their dogs Ivy and Clementine.  This tired her out so she slept like a champ when we drove back to OH the next day!

 On our drive back to Ohio, we were able to stop by in PA to see Bob's dad for a little while.

Back at home, we did start school (in a somewhat desultory manner) again.  The whole reason we had to rush back on Jan. 2 was because Jonathan's beloved electronics class started again Jan. 3, but the rest of us started the next week.  We left Luke in VA to drive back to AL from there, but Nathan was still with us in Ohio, so it was hard to feel like we were entirely back to our normal routine.  For this break, Nathan worked as a Lyft driver.  He made a nice bit of money, and he was able to just work when he wanted to, which was great.

The weekend of Jan. 11-13, Bob and Nathan headed back to VA to work on the house.  I decided it would be fun to have Amanda and Elissa come out Saturday for dinner, since we would be so lonely here.  I started hearing rumors of snow, so I told them to bring stuff to spend the night.  They drove out Saturday afternoon in a bit of a lull in the already-falling snow, and we had a real snow slumber party!  Hot chocolate, chocolate chip cookies, sleeping late on Sunday--so fun!  We ended up getting about 9 inches, so it was a good storm!

 The kids had a ball playing in the snow.  Luna loved it too--as long as there were people out there with her!

 We had to do a lot of shoveling so that Amanda and Elissa could get their car out to go back to Cedarville Sunday afternoon.  Also, I had foolishly not even thought about the big van, and so it just stayed out on the street where we normally park it.  This meant the snow plow plowed around it, so it was really buried, and also we had to dig out our mailbox.  Grrr.  I won't make that mistake again!  We had the same experience several times in VA, so I can't believe I didn't think about it here!  I think I really didn't take the forecast very seriously, lol. 

 Jonathan racing around with Luna. 

 The kids built snow forts in the back yard with neighbor kids on both sides of us.

 Amanda and Elissa preparing to venture out back to Cedarville.  They made it back safely, praise the Lord!

 I even found our snowshoes in a box in the garage!  I bought these after the great snowstorm of January, 2016, but then we never got another huge snow like that to use them in.  Well . . . they were okay, but I don't know that they really helped me stay above the surface much, lol.  I still felt like I was wading through snow, except now I had these giant things on my feet as well!  But it was fun.

 Luna, snow-loving Newfie.

 While we were frolicking in the snow, Bob and Nathan were busily getting things done on the house, and on their way home, they stopped in PA to visit Bob's dad again in the new place where he is living!  Bob's sister Ann and her husband Wally were also visiting.

 Last Wednesday night we had one last big dinner, inviting Grandma and Grandpa, and Aunt Claire and Uncle Jim over to say goodbye to Nathan.  He left Friday morning to drive back to college.

But wait!  Things still weren't back to normal!  Luke doesn't have classes on Friday, and with Monday being a holiday, he also left Friday morning to drive up here for the long weekend!  He went to Cedarville and picked up Elissa Friday night, since word was another winter storm was on the way.

 We baked a ton of ginger snaps, at Luke's request.  We had also gone to the library Friday afternoon to pick up a bunch of movies, so we were set!  Lots of games of Mastermind were played, as well as some other games.

Drew and Verity have really been into our "I Spy" books, and they spent a lot of time with Luke and Elissa, pouring over the pages.  Those books are actually pretty darn tricky.  Good thing both Luke and Elissa have sharp eyes. 

Church was cancelled this week, so we missed a second week in a row.  It was very relaxing to sleep in, and I made a breakfast casserole (for "brunch", lol).  Sunday evening, we headed over to my parents' house for dinner.  I had made spaghetti sauce in the crockpot, so I brought that, plus bread and salad, and we cooked the noodles over there.  Even though we were disappointed by the outcomes of both games, it was a lot of fun, and we also made tons of progress on a puzzle, which is really fun and relaxing for me.  Such a nice weekend!

Luke took Elissa back to Cedarville last night, and he left this morning.  So now we really are ready to get back to our usual routine, even though no one wants to.  Sigh.  What a tremendous break!  Now--to hang on until summer . . .