Everything went according to plan. The pipes did not freeze and burst. They didn’t even freeze...much. Just the line to the ice maker but it is fine now and we still have fresh ice.
The plants didn’t freeze. Maybe a little bit freezer burnt around the edges for some, but not too bad. They’ll come back. Probably. Maybe. And, praise the Lord, we are eating fresh picked collards and mustard greens again this week and will be further into the winter, baring anything unforseen, like an unexpected super freeze, of course.
The paper got to the printer on time, although the final pages were done from the kitchen counter after my truck windshield began to ice over on the way home last Monday night, but I made it with time to spare even.
It was one of those unforseen things, however, that really put a damper on the deep freeze of 2024. We had stayed, over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, at the Ross Barnett Reservoir house where we spend most weekends, holiday or not.
Wife Danny, teaches third grade at Conehatta Elementary School, and they were out for the Monday holiday so she was going to spend the day in front of the fireplace and then head back to Sebastopol in the afternoon.
Then the ice warnings came and schools began announcing they would be closed for Tuesday and then Wednesday as well. We monitored the weather and stuck around.
True to the predictions, it was frigid and Tuesday morning there was a nice layer of ice on everything especially the roads and bridges so the kitchen counter turned into the kitchen office again that day and the internet and WiFi stayed busy from home.
Tuesday night was supposed to be the cold night and with all that ice around it was turning out to be a really cold night indeed.
I decided to turn in early so as to get an early start to the real office Wednesday morning because there was reported to still be some pretty icy patches and indeed there were. The house at the lake, is a two story older home — no where near as old as the house in Sebastopol — built in 1979, I think, and the bedrooms are upstairs.
Danny remained on the couch in front of a roaring fake gas fire watching television, and I headed up the stairs, crawled under the covers, and quickly drifted off into a cold winter night’s slumber as the central unit continued to blast warm air into the rooms from it’s location in the attic adjacent to our bedroom.
Sometime in the middle of the night — the night where the temperatures dropped down to single digits over there — I awakened and took a drink from the glass of water I always have by the bed. It was good, and wet, and cold, I thought, and turned over and dosed back off again.
Sometime around 5:00 a.m., I awoke again and quickly came to the determination that the weather prognosticator had prognosticated correct this time because it was quite chilly in the bedroom and in our bath as I brushed my teeth. Downstairs as I flicked on the light and the truth came to light, as the thermostat read 50 degrees on the inside and 8 degrees out the front door.
The heat, my friends, had died in the middle of the night of the coldest night this season. It was bitter cold in the kitchen so I fired up all eyes on the stove top and went and put on an extra pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt under a heavy winter bathrobe.
Then I commenced to crawl through the little door in our closet that goes to the attic where the heater resides along with Christmas and Halloween decorations, and suitcases and old dishes, and most of the other things that most other people store in their attics as well. It wasn’t much warmer than that 8 degrees outside in that attic and my hands trembled as I fumbled to clean out this little valve thing that I watched a real technician clean out 20 years ago probably, and that technique had worked for this amateur tech several times over the years when the fire didn’t want to fire up.
It didn’t work for this amateur tech on the coldest day of the winter in the year 2024!
Even an extra hot shower before hurriedly jumping into my warm truck to get away from that frigid nightmare didn’t help much.
I called in the pros, but it was a full day before they could arrive, and of course a live person does have to be at home when the pros arrive...regardless of the temperature inside or out.
So the kitchen became my cave and a couple of space heaters and an electric blanket became our best friends on the day that everything was actually going according to plan, baring something very, very unforseen.
On the bright side, it only took the tech about 30 minutes to pop in a new igniter once he arrived and everything was warm and toasty again over there this past weekend.
You know, I do love it when a plan comes together. Kind of, anyway!
