OK, this is post number two of my catch-up series. Week number one I didn't get to because school started and was hecktic. Week number two didn't happen because we had a winter blizzard, got like 18 inches of snow, my parents were in town so I was spending time with them, half of a massive tree fell from the weight of the snow, narrowly and thankfully missing our shed, and very thankfully missing our house. Tecnically it did kit our shed a little, some of the branches broke off as they hit the shed roof. good, wrist or arm sized branches, so I'm really hopping they didn't do serious damage to it. At least I hope it's not dripping melted snow in there. Hopefully there are no punctures, but there is no way to tell until it gets a bit warmer and we can chansaw up the tree and get to the shed door, which is currently behind a tree full of branches.
Then our pipes froze. Our house has some really weird, and I'd say dumb, design decisions. The kitchen sink pipes freeze when it gets really cold. And now the poorly placed water meter valve and water shutoff froze. It's a length of pipe that pops up in the unheated garage and then back down into the concrete. The previous owners said that it had never frozen previously, only the kitchen sink. However, we were worried, and so created a structure with insulation to cover the piping, with heat tape wrapped around it. Well, it got really cold, like negative 30's with wind chill, and it froze. It took days to get a plumber out to look at it, and when they did they saw that the pipes had burst, so they had to replace them, plus the water meter. They put on even more heat tape. A few days later, it dropped again to negative 20 or so, and it froze, again. We fiddled around and got a space heater blowing into the enclosed space, and now all the pipes seem to be melted, but it's STILL frozen, no water going into the house, so it must have frozen below ground or something. So we are out of water again, probably until it warms up for a few days.
It's frustrating, it's disheartening, and it was exhausting, as Suzannah woke me up at 4-somthing am in the morning, panicked that the pipes had frozen again and not sure what to do. That was yesterday. We had come back late-ish from a friends birthday party, so I was in a dour sleep deprived haze all day, but had so much to do that I couldn't nap or take it easy, I had to work all day. And of course, being so low on sleep, everything too 2-3 times as long, because I was trying to do it carefully. I doubt I retained much of what I read that day for classes, but I got the time sensitive stuff I needed to get done, done, and then got to sleep in today.
So, we are getting buckets of water from our kind neighbors (gratitude to them) to flush the toilets, and jugs of tap water to put at sinks so we can wash our hands, and taking showers at other places, though less often, because it's extra work and time to go over to someone else's house to shower, plus it's still in the negatives, so you don't want to go out unless you have to. All the normal day to day things of living are made more time consuming and harder, like washing dishes or making food or going to the bathroom.
Meanwhile, I've got my normal seriously heavy graduate school workload. Plus an event coming up next week for my volunteer activities that is a bunch more work.
I'm grateful that we still have heat, electricity, and internet (though the internet has been less reliable since the freeze, not sure what's going on with that.
And I suppose it's nice every so often, to have to make do without the modern amenities we are used to, to remind us how fortunate we are to have things like running water and non-burst pipes.
All this to say: this is why the last few posts have been late.
OK, on to the final post, the one that's actually due today.
No comments:
Post a Comment