Last Sunday, my husband and I sported our New England Patriots tees and got ourselves worked up over one of the worst football games we have ever seen. It was just ugly. Goddamn Jets.
The saddest part is that was the day I finally got around to doing the family photo with the Patriots gear on for the pre-baby book. And now the memory is tainted by a crappy game...a crappy game and being blasted by freezing water in our basement.
With great sadness and heads hanging low, we climbed into bed. Tucked in nice and tight, we were reading happily (albeit sulkily) when we heard (and felt) a loud thud followed by a very strange noise that we were willing to chalk up to the heater doing something weird. So, here's what's stupid...if the heater WAS, in fact, doing something weird, we probably would have died (in a cloud of smoke, in a house fire, in some other furnace-related something), but we were perfectly content to just stay tucked in, reading.
It was when I had to pee that I finally decided to investigate.
In the front room the sound was far more menacing. It finally occurred to me that if we were dealing with a heating problem, it was most likely that said problem was going to result in the house blowing up. So, further investigation led me to the basement where I discovered that the problem was not the furnace but the water main. Sure that we were dealing with a frozen-pipe-burst, I started turning off valves that didn't require entering the splash zone. Finally, my husband was able to shut the valve off on the pipe that was blowing water all over the basement.
We are fortunate to have a good plumber who came over the next morning and fixed the pipe. And, as it turns out, it was not a frozen burst, but a poorly plumbed main line from the beginning of the house (read: easy fix, and "who I hate most today" trophy has to be shared between the goddamn Jets and the goddamn previous owners of this house). And we had two toilets with one flush each to pee before bed and again when we got up in the morning. Still, it was really cold standing in the basement in soaking wet jammies.
On the bright side, it snapped the serious Patriots fans in the house out of their "no superbowl this year" pity party.
No comments:
Post a Comment