December 20, 2016: The House is Thawed

Tuesday. Well the house thawed out this morning.  But as soon as it did and we were able to get water trickling through the house we noticed that the pipe that is exposed in the back yard behind the air conditioning condenser had blown and was spraying water all over.  Just great.  So until we can get someone to fix that we are stuck at the hotel anyway and can’t run the water in the house.

We spent much of the day trying to coordinate someone to come take a look at the leak and get it fixed.  We let it leak for a little bit until we cleared out all of the pipes and made sure that we had no other issues and no ice in the lines.  Then we shut it off all day.

Hopefully we can get things fixed tomorrow or we are going to have a really rough time.  So still living in the hotel for now.

 

The Leak

 

December 19, 2016: Living in the Hotel

Dominica went over this morning to inspect the house and see how things were.  Verdict: everything is still frozen solid.  No hope of getting in there today whatsoever.  We need to extend at the hotel before we will know if we can get into the house.  It is staying so cold outside.

To make things worse, Dominica discovered that Rachel had shut off the heat at the house, argh.  So the house was down to forty six degrees and had no way to heat up.  We have been having heat issues and this is not going to help.  Nothing to be done now, we had had a hope that the heat from the house would spread to the pipes, but now that the house is nearly frozen that can’t happen.

We turned the heat back on and hoped that it would at least get warm enough to keep any further damage from happening.

We did a late dinner in the hotel.  We tried out the hotel’s restaurant so Dominica and I got baked brie from there!  Yummy.

My DuoLingo is coming along very well.

I went over to the house late and picked up dinner while I was out and went to Lowe’s and got the water key so that I could shut off the water at the street to make sure that the house does not flood as soon as it gets warm enough for the water to flow.  Without someone there that would be a huge disaster.  So no water until we check it manually, now.

December 18, 2016: Frozen Pipes (Again)

Well our adventure today is that our pipes in our Texas home have frozen, again.  They froze that first winter that we had the house and, as far as we know, they have not frozen since.  But last night was too much for them and we woke up this morning with no water.  We know that the water was working late last night as we used it around four in the morning.  But it was super cold and apparently it just got too cold for the water last night.  Just great.  Now we have a bit of a disaster on our hands.

We called around and found the hotel right down the street, the brand new Courtyard by Marriott had plenty of space and could give us a great deal so we booked that for two days.  We called over and they said that since we were frozen and had kids that they would get us right in this morning, so we were down the street and into the hotel long before noon.  We are very thankful for their help.

Our hotel at the Courtyard is awesome.  The whole facility is really nice and absolutely brand new.  Our room was really great.  We will always use them here.

We took the opportunity of not being at home to go out to IHOP for a late breakfast.  That was yummy.

When we got back to the hotel, I noticed that the fire hydrant in front of the hotel had exploded and there was a waterfall in their parking lot.  They were not aware of it yet.  It is so cold out here that even the fire hydrants are freezing and bursting!

I visited the house late tonight to inspect it and make sure that nothing had burst.  I found the house unable to get above sixty degrees and then found Chris and Rachel outside working on Rachel’s car with the doors not completely shut so ice cold air from the outside was coming right into the house where the heater cannot keep up.

I felt the air ducts and felt like the heater was not working properly but Chris assured me it was just my imagination (spoiler: it wasn’t.)

December 17, 2016: Zootopia

Saturday. Worked all day.  Kept pretty busy with projects.  This evening I finally sat down in the living room and watched Zootopia with Liesl.  She has been asking me to watch this with her for a very long time and it just always gets pushed off more and more.  No excuses tonight, it is a daddy Liesl movie night.  The movie was quite good and we had a good time hanging out together.

After Zootopia we also finished watching the old Pink Panther movie that we had started watching about a month ago.  Liesl remember it and wanted to finish it.  We did not have that much more to go, so once we had completed it we got started on another one of the Pink Panther movies!

December 16, 2016: Salt and Rocket

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Salt Stack this past week and today I am building the first dedicated Salt server.  I am liking Salt a lot and finding it to be very useful.

I also ended up building a Rocket.Chat server tonight and building my first Docker server.  A busy day indeed.

Found a great channel that taught me what Latin sounded like.  I really enjoy learning about languages.