Sheep Guarding Llama

One of those things that homeowners absolutely dread, waking up in the morning to discover that there is no water flowing in your house… and that it is very cold outside.  Our pipes are frozen.  Contrary to popular belief, pipes can actually freeze in Texas.  Apparently, we have no discovered much to our chagrin, they freeze in Texas all of the time because no one does any planning when building their homes here and the pipes are neither insulated nor buried properly deep.  So this is just normal “business as usual” in Texas, we are told.

After living in the north, especially in icy New York for nearly all of my life, and having never even heard of a real person ever having their pipes freeze it is truly amazing to me that being here in Texas and being on a day when it is not even cold enough to need to wear more than a nice fleece to stay warm, that our pipes have frozen.  It isn’t like our house is cold either or that we are not home and using the water.  We ran water at two in the morning and it was fine then.  But by eight when I went to turn on the shower, there was nothing.  Nothing at all.

How, in Texas, on a day not very cold, in just six hours could our pipes freeze?

We gave the pipes an hour or two to warm up.  No luck.  We aren’t totally convinced that the issue is frozen pipes, but we are decently confident.  We called a plumber and they are coming out later today.  We also called the city, just to be sure that our water was not shut off on us.  It was not.  But the city of Carrollton told us that there were getting one call after another from people whose pipes had frozen.   Wonderful.

The plumber arrived pretty early on.  He inspected everything and, in the end, could find absolutely nothing.  He wasn’t even sure where our pipes came into the house!  He decided that they must come in in the garage and told us to heat the garage.  At least we have a place to start.  Of course, we have no way to heat the garage so that is going to be a challenge in and of itself.

So once the plumber left my first task was to head out to Lowe’s to pick up a workshop space heater.  I ran out and found that the store had had rather a run on space heaters.  I managed to find a little shop space heater, a yellow and black Stanley unit that seemed like it might meet out needs.  There were very few heaters of any serious power available so it would have to do.

On the way home I stopped at McDonald’s to pick up lunch for the family as without water we really can’t be creating dishes because we have no means by which to clean them and if we end up in a protracted water outage situation then having dirty dishes lingering about is going to be a very bad thing indeed.

Brian came up not long after I returned from Lowes.  We decided that the little space heater wasn’t going to heat anything and that the garage was still below freezing.  Argh.  So we ran out to Home Depot, which is really just a block farther away than Lowe’s, to see what we could find.

We managed to find, for just $99, a forced air heater – what I grew up calling a salamander.  There was a larger kerosene model like my dad uses in the barn but I opted for the smaller propane model.  It is still rates to heat 1,250 square feet which, in a pinch with unnecessary rooms closed off, is enough to heat the entire house.  Since we are only using it to heat the garage which can’t be more than five hundred square feet it should be quite dramatic overkill, in fact.

As we were leaving Home Depot, I ran into Dwayne while in line to check out.  He started asking about the frozen pipes and he felt that what the plumber had said could not be the case so he said that he would come by and take a look at it for me since we were right around the corner.

Dwayne was over for at least half of an hour, maybe an hour.  He did tons more than the plumber did.  He took all of the water meters apart, tried heating in the ground pipes, went through the garage, did all kinds of tests inside and out and managed to determine that the issue was not in the house but outside somewhere.  He also positively identified that the city was most definitely providing water to us so that could not be the problem.  But, we were not able to get the water back on.  We just know more about what is wrong.

Brian was over during the late afternoon and we ended up working on some phone stuff before packing up and driving over to Watson’s house tonight for a meeting.  Originally people were going to be coming over to our place but without any water than seems like it would be a very bad idea.

It ended up being around two in the morning when I finally got back from the meeting.  It was pretty productive, though.  And nice to get out and hang out with the guys too.

So in the end, no water for today.  Fingers crossed for tomorrow, but looking at the forecast it looks as thought there is unlikely to be enough heat in the air to get us out from under being frozen until Thursday at best.  There is some hope for tomorrow but not very much.

This morning Dominica got up before me and said that the water was not working.  It is below freezing outside tonight but it’s nowhere near the temperature where you talk about pipes freezing so it doesn’t seem like that could be the issue.  Definitely worrisome that there is no water.  So, after just a few minutes, I get up and when I try the water, all is fine.  No issues at all.  We decided that as Dominica was very, very sleepy that she had turned the handle on the faucet incorrectly and was too tired to realize it.  We think nothing more of it, fools that we are.

It is Monday and into work I go.  Not a very exciting day.  Very little to report.  Brian and I went over to Panera Bread at lunch to have a quick meeting and to eat, of course.

After work, Jen and I went to Panera Bread as well.  We ended up talking for about two hours.  It was a good use of time, though.  Liesl didn’t get up from her nap until late.  We had hot chocolate instead of coffee.

Got home.  Dominica made dinner and we ate at home and watched Battlestar Galactica.  We are totally addicted to it now.

Before going to bed, Liesl decided that she wanted a bath.  A bath at midnight.  It helps to keep her calm and makes going to bed easier, though, so we were okay with it.  Her bath will become significant later as we used water in quantity at midnight.

After Liesl went to bed, Dominica and I stayed up until two in the morning watching the new Battlestar Galactica. You know that we are addicted to a new series when we start staying up really late to watch it.  We are really bad about that.

The more that we watch shows in our bedroom the more anxious we are getting to find a loveseat to go in there.  It is really uncomfortable sitting in bed trying to watch things, especially when we want to eat and Oreo and Liesl are climbing all over us.  We hope to get a cheap loveseat for our bedroom sometime relatively soon.

Finally Dominica, Liesl and I have a quiet day with nothing going on whatsoever at the house.  We have no plans today at all.

We did more work around the house.  We have been going through all of the remaining boxes over the past few days to make sure that we know where everything is and have a place to put everything.  We are attempting to identify all of the boxes of books and to make sure that that is all that is really in there.  There are so many book boxes, it is crazy.  We have nowhere to stage them while we wait to do the work in the garage so that they will have a final home.

At the moment, all of the boxes of books are just piling up in front of the den area where they await a new disposition.  It is very inconvenient to have them there but we are not really sure what else to do in the mean time.  The garage can’t be done soon enough.  Suddenly we will have all kinds of extra space in the house.  We can’t wait.

We relaxed, we ate at home.  We watched a lot of “baby people” as Liesl calls them – the Fisher Price videos of Little People. This is Liesl’s new favourite show.  She just loves watching it over and over.  We bought these two Little People DVDs at Walmart in Geneseo while we were at home.  We weren’t looking for them, I just saw them on a shelf while we were shopping for something else.  What an awesome buy they have turned out to be!

Liesl loves using the term “baby” instead of “little”.  It is very funny.

I got up at a pretty decent hour this morning so that I could get up and get to work for the office.  I put in a few hours of work.  Then Dominica and I did some work around the house and played with Liesl.

Early this afternoon Souder and then Watson came over to the house to work for several hours.  It was probably five or six hours and I think that it was pretty productive.  We are all getting together again tomorrow evening but this was good prep for that.

Not much to really report today, it was a rather uneventful day in general.

It’s Friday.  I love short weeks.  Only three days of actually being in the office this week.  Very nice.  I drove down to the office this morning.  Doing lunch at the club today.

I picked up Souder at a quarter till noon and we run over to La Cima where we were meeting Tim, the other Souder, for lunch in the dining room.  We had a nice lunch and got a chance to relax.  It was a good lunch today.  I skipped the buffet today and went for the real menu for a change.

Today is the last day of the SEC freeze so there is pretty much nothing going on at work except for incessant explanations as to when the freeze actually ends, which is midnight tonight eastern time.  So while there is no real work for me to do tonight there is a fair amount stacking up for me to do tomorrow.

After I got home at a decent time tonight, we relaxed and watched the first season of the remake of Battlestar Galactica.  We managed to finish the entire original 1978 series.  We had wanted to go back and watch the ten episode long 1980 series but realized when we went to start it that the first three episodes were not available on Netflix OnDemand and that we would have to get it via emailed DVD.  What a pain.  So while we are waiting on that we moved on to the remake series from 2003.

We are totally loving the new Battlestar Galactica.  The remake is completely awesome.  Great writing, amazing updates and explanations that make the original series seem even better.  They’ve done good things with most of the characters, made interesting changes and, I think the best part, they went back and explained why so many things in the original series were so quirky.  Like why this advanced culture was using wired phones.  They actually explained that in a reasonable way.

We are totally addicted to watching Battlestar Galactica now.  Even Liesl really likes it.  It is neat watching these with her because I was two when I first watched these and now she is watching some of the same episodes that I watched long ago at her age as well as watching new ones that are from her own generation.