{"id":207,"date":"2015-01-20T15:25:41","date_gmt":"2015-01-20T15:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/?p=207"},"modified":"2015-01-20T15:25:41","modified_gmt":"2015-01-20T15:25:41","slug":"frozen-pipes-and-distractible-teens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/archives\/207","title":{"rendered":"Frozen Pipes and Distractible Teens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week was cold. Really<\/em> cold. Tuesday evening, one of my kids turned on the bathroom water tap and realized no water was coming out. Something was clearly wrong. You\u2019re probably thinking this child came downstairs immediately to tell me something was wrong. Don\u2019t be silly. This child\u2014whom I shall call She Who Will Never Be A Plumber<\/em>\u2014came downstairs to tell me about the upcoming shows that she couldn\u2019t wait<\/em> to watch. Then she went to bed.<\/p>\n

Wednesday morning, I tried to turn on the taps. \u201cOh, yeah, I forgot to tell you about that,\u201d said She Who Will Never Be A Plumber<\/em>. An unhappy discussion ensued, and a list of rules was created to ensure that this child would know when a house issue was more important than a stupid TV show. The rules:<\/p>\n

*If it used to move and it suddenly stops moving: Tell me immediately
\n*If it used to not move and it suddenly starts moving: Tell me immediately
\n*If it used to be silent and it suddenly becomes noisy: Tell me immediately
\n*If it used to make noise and it suddenly becomes silent: Tell me immediately<\/p>\n

Of course, this did nothing to remedy the current situation, which was that we were now only a few frozen pipes away from becoming a pioneer family\u2014plus there was the looming possibility that the cracked pipes were going to create an impressive waterfall down into our kitchen.<\/p>\n

So I did what any independent, middle-aged, reasonably intelligent person would do in a situation like this. I called my dad. He\u2019s 77 years old and, if my calculations are correct, is 36.5 billion times handier than I am. He and his equally handy neighbor had the problem diagnosed in half an hour. Turns out when the previous owners had lobbed the upstairs bathroom into the house (to quickly increase its sale value), they\u2019d shoved the pipes through a poorly-insulated exterior wall. To complicate matters, mice had painstakingly chewed holes through the foundation under the patio. The result: Outdoor air was blowing through the mouse holes into the old wine cellar and then up through the insulation-free walls, turning the water pipes into icicles.<\/p>\n

[In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that the reason I\u2019d never noticed the icy winds in the wine cellar was because no bottle of wine has ever made it past the kitchen unopened. I\u2019ve never actually used<\/em> the wine cellar.]<\/p>\n

Luckily, our bathroom pipes turned out to be made of flexible plastic, not copper. Which meant our wall icicles were not likely to split, even though they\u2019d been frozen over 14 hours. Valves were shut off, things were warmed, magic ensued and within two hours I had running water. I then staple-gunned heavy plastic all around the bottom of the porch, forming a cheap, yet surprisingly effective wind-blocking skirt. It is as attractive as it sounds.<\/p>\n

In my last post, My Michelle Duggar Moment<\/a>, I mentioned the 119 mice I\u2019d killed since moving in last March. We\u2019re up to 126 mice, now, but their freeloading days will soon be over. As soon as it warms up enough that I can lay on the ground without developing hypothermia, I\u2019ll convince myself that I\u2019m not claustrophobic, crawl through the dark, filthy 16\u201d high space under the porch and block up their entry holes. Alcohol will be involved.<\/p>\n

Did you enjoy this article?<\/strong> Subscribe to my blog and you\u2019ll never miss my monthly posts (plus I\u2019ll send you a free copy of There\u2019s Nothing Wrong With Claudia to say thanks). It\u2019s easy: Just enter your email address in the upper right corner of this page. I\u2019ll never sell, share, or rent your contact information, because I hate it when people do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week was cold. Really cold. Tuesday evening, one of my kids turned on the bathroom water tap and realized no water was coming out. Something was clearly wrong. You\u2019re probably thinking this child came downstairs immediately to tell me something was wrong. Don\u2019t be silly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}