Better luck next week? Sorry that it sucked so bad.
frozen bursting pipes and no way to thaw them
Aren't you supposed to let them drip? Or is this some old wives' tale?
You're supposed to leave your faucets on at a bit more than a drip. That flow is supposed to keep the pipes from freezing.
You're also supposed to keep babies at more than 55 degrees, unless your baby is from Tierra del Fuego. That would probably be a bit distracting.
I was answering Stanley's question, not suggesting that heebie had been remiss in turning off her taps.
4: Babies, like most mammals, are capable of maintaining their own body temperature.
One evening, while I was in high school, I was hanging out with my friends at the house of one friend's parents. There was a defunct alarm system there. We weren't getting up to much mischief, but anyhow we probably weren't supposed to be congregating there all unsupervised and high-school-y. "Hey", one of my friends said, at some point, "I wonder what happens if you hit these two buttons at the bottom of the alarm panel at the same time?" "Uh, nothing?" responded the daughter of the homeowners, "that hasn't been hooked up since we've owned the house."
Ha ha! Chaos ensues.
We dripped them, but insufficiently. We also covered the spigots. But to no avail. For the single remaining working pipe, we shut off the water altogether and just drained it.
7: Apropos of little, I am reminded of the time when chaos ensued when a friend decided to see what would happen if he blinked out SOS repeatedly with his porch light.
We came home from winter break a couple of years ago to find that a huge wind storm had knocked out the power and that temperatures were hovering near freezing. We had no electricity for four days. It pretty much sucked, especially because we had a six-month-old at the time. Fortunately, we had (have) a wood stove, so we were able to keep it reasonably warm and Little House on the Prairiey.
Yeah Internet back just five minutes ago. And cable tv, now I know how cold it is 19 degrees. I was very close to screaming meanies.
We got down in the low 60s in here most of the day, with 59 for a couple hours. Course we have sheets and blankets over all the windows and doors and big desktops with CRT monitors warming things up.
Three blackouts of 15 minutes about an hour apart this morning. Hope we don't get any tomorrow.
I'm told by the family historian that we were only without power for three days. Still, I suffered, which is the point of the story. Also: Pa had to kill a couple of Injuns, Mary got scarlet fever, and then we raised a barn come spring.
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Kristen Bell will be on TV again! Will this force me to start paying for Showtime? Or should I assume in advance that it won't be very good, like every other post-VM thing she has done except Party Down?
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You're also supposed to keep babies at more than 55 degrees, unless your baby is from Tierra Del Fuego.
It is true: babies in Tierra Del Fuego are at about 55° South.
It was all so out of the ordinary that it didn't register as a bad day, exactly. A bad day is when every mundane thing you hate happens all in a row.
OT: It really isn't possible to use the word "girth" completely innocently, is it? Because I'm reading a paper that uses it as a technical term and it's cracking me up, especially as I suspect the one native English speaker among the authors put it in without his coauthors suspecting anything was amiss.
Hopefully the fact that tomorrow is the lunar new year is an auspicious sign that the end of today will also signal the end of this particular set of difficulties.
I have the same suspicion about the word "engorged".
It really isn't possible to use the word "girth" completely innocently, is it?
I saw a trailer for a movie where this guy was so completely engorged that he had to cut off his own arm.
Someone should sell t-shirts that say "Ithaca is engorged".
25: http://www.flickr.com/photos/boojee/3614349570/
On the chaos-ensuing front, I was walking across a parking lot yesterday and noticed a Honda Fit seemed to be slowly rolling out of its parking space. I realize the (not-running) car has two eleven-ish year olds inside, and they're freaking out. They get out of the vehicle and tried to stop it/push it back, but they're too small. I and my fellow traveler stepped in to assist, guiding the car back into the space, re-engaging the E-brake and advising not to touch that lever again, deal?
It felt like retribution for the time when I was about eleven and, waiting for my mom to come out to the car, managed to put it in neutral. The car rolled backwards out of the driveway, and then the neighbors across the alley got to pick out a brand new garage door.
28: I did that about the age of 5 or so, but all I took out was our neighbor's mailbox.
28.2: I did that when I was three or four. Ran over my brother's arm to no lasting ill effect.
How's that warm weather working out for you, Stanster?
You know who else had a shitty day? Egyptians.
31: After a high of 66° today, we're heading back down to 30° tonight. Such a tease, man.
28-30: One of my sisters did it out into a very busy road leading my mother to need to respond to a page concerning, "a crying young girl in the backseat of green Dodge in the middle of Exchange St." Not a moment my mother looks back on with pride.
33: Noticed that--some wind too. Why I asked.
chaos ensued when a friend decided to see what would happen if he blinked out SOS repeatedly with his porch light
I don't understand this -- someone actually recognized what he was doing and responded? Does N.C. have people in watchtowers looking out for this sort of thing?
Ah, the alarm. This happened to us in September/early October, when we had a succession of power cuts around our way.
The landlady had installed a hugely complicated alarm system some time (going by the design) in the early 90s, i.e. the peak of Crime! Dread in the UK. We don't have the PIN and she claims that neither does she. The thing is wired to the phone system (I suspected it of interfering with the DSL service). But, as I found out when I stripped the NTE5 socket and reassembled it, nobody's listening to the other end because the monitoring subscription hasn't been renewed in many moons.
So we get home and the power is off. A few seconds to take this in, and then the alarms go off. I have a couple of goes guessing the number, no dice, obviously. I turn off the power to the whole thing but it keeps quacking under what is presumably an internal battery in the steel locked cabinet in the cellar where all the wires go. (It's quite a rig - an impressive loom of two-wire phone cable) I call the landlady, who doesn't answer.
I call the phone number of the installers, as marked on the side of the cabinet. It's obsolete. I guess the new area code and call again. It's turned into a taxi firm. I google it. No trace. I call directory enquiries. No trace. I google for an alarm firm near us. I call them. They say it will stop after 20 minutes. It's been going on for 40 minutes. They say to cut a wire. I cut the wires leading to the control unit. Nothing happens. I cut the connection to the phone line, just in case. Eventually I just isolated the sounder. Peace, perfect peace.
At some point I'll have to get it fixed, at which point we'll need the PIN so it doesn't start yelling as soon as the sounder is reconnected.
28-30, 34:
The son of a dear friend of my father did this when his mother had gotten out of the car to get the mail. The car ran over her and killed her.
The kid, then one or two years old, is now an adult. I recently learned that the whole community is engaged in a conspiracy of silence with respect to his role in his mother's death. Everyone matter-of-factly says that the emergency brake failed, even though they know that to be false.
I did that emergency brake thing when I was a kid. As far as I know I didn't kill anybody. Actually, the car just rolled a couple of feet and stopped. Just goes to show you: don't raise kids anywhere that's not perfectly level.
We had our pipes freeze just last week! Our 1/2 inch PVC pipes were too close to an exterior wall in an empty house with a heater that decided to crap out. The 3/4 inch PVC pipes didn't have a problem.
The hardwood floors were not at all happy about the situation.
Also, I did the emergency brake thing too. When I was 16.
The neighbor's tree was not at all happy about that.
So I had to shovel the deck before 1/2 inch of ice made the snow I'd left up there since the last two storms dangerously heavy, and, as there is only edge of the deck that is not directly above an actual entrance to someone else's apartment, that was the edge I had to fling the snow over. Now. I did check, once, in the beginning, to see that no one was standing stupidly below me, and was relieved to find that directly below me was just more snow, not like a path or anything. So I proceeded to chuck snow over the edge for the next 45 minutes, until alerted to...an irregularity.
What kind of person insists on going out to check their obviously hibernating garden in the middle of winter? More specifically, what kind of person insists on doing so by standing in the exact area in which I've been blindly chucking snow, as evidenced by all the little snow pile pock marks on the ground?
Let me tell you. Her head was not at all happy about that.
Just goes to show you: don't raise kids anywhere that's not perfectly level.
Or raise them underwater. Things move slowly there.
The government of Narnia is encouraging its citizens to do it like rabbits.
The government of Narnia is encouraging its citizens to do it like rabbits.
Gah, why did I start reading the comments?
I read the comments on news sites in order to remind myself that I hate people.
"Malia, Sasha: how many times do I have to tell you not to pull the emergency venting lever when I'm in talking to the snork patrol? If you accidentally surface you might run into one of the piles of radioactive proletarian corpses."
I never did the parking brake thing, and I'm not sure why. I could chalk it up to being the son of a stern when he needed to be mechanic, but that didn't keep us from doing a bunch of other dumb shit. Even if I had, though, not only did we live under Tweety's child rearing conditions, we didn't have a driveway and my parents were in the habbit of parking the car in gear. So, really, why bother?
37: Reminds me of my comedy of errors over Christmas. My parents were abroad and wanted me to drop by the house to hide the mail and fill the bird feeder and all that crap. It's been quite a while since I lived there and they've changed the alarm system in the interim, something I forgot. So I get in the door, the warning starts to beep, and I open the cupboard where the keypad used to be. But isn't any more. "I know, maybe it's under this flip panel." Which wasn't a flip panel, but rather the flimsy plastic shell surrounding the guts of the alarm system. And my tampering with it has now set off the alarm. After about 15 minutes of trying to find the phone number for the alarm company, I realise that the keypad is now outside the cupboard above the door.
So, wait, the Snorks really took place off the coast of Dubai? I'm really confused now.
So we turned off the main water valve last night and emptied the remaining single sink faucet. This morning, the main valve is frozen in the off position.
Fortunately we filled the bathtub up with water first, and boiled several pots of water. But sheesh. We don't even know how many pipes have burst.
Ack. Sorry to hear that, heebers. It sounds not fun.
52: you know how the smurfs were actually a secret plot to prepare people for the arrival of Krishna, by conditioning them to accept blue people? Same deal with the snorks, but substitute secret underwater cities for the world's elite.
54: Gaawk. Try not to stab anybody. I know I'd have trouble.
57: Or if you have to stab someone, use an icicle so the evidence melts. But really a no-stabbing policy is a pretty good one to abide by, if you can.
54: Luckily, there's a large quantity of snow for you to melt!
59: Actually, not the case specifically in Heebsterland.
Everyone's parking brake story reminds me of one of my greatest childhood anxieties--that while my sister and I were waiting patiently in the car for my mother, the car would either start running or start moving and I would have to try to stop it in some way. I was filled with dread about this as I knew nothing about driving and everything on the dashboard looked confusing. Now that I know this actually happened to people (and was even tragic!) I feel far more justified in my neuroses.
38, 61: John Cole put this VW ad up as "cute", but somewhat under the influence of 38 & 61 the ending gave me the willies. (Nor was I fond of people who used to start their cars remotely in the parking lot at my prior work location.)
