Winter Bites
It has been the most unkind of weeks.
Last Sunday, we discovered that the water main to one of the cottages had frozen, or had just generally crapped out, despite the fact that the cottage, along with every other room we had, was totally sold out for President's Week, which was rapidly approaching. Various pipe-heating agendas were set in motion, including the purchase of $1000 worth of equipment that would thaw a frozen underground pipe, if that was indeed the problem, if only we could get a good connection to it, which was ultimately thwarted by a slightly busted shut-off valve, which I suspect may have been the culprit all along, since we started fooling with the beleaguered thing as soon as we started troubleshooting the problem.
Sigh. Then, in the midst of everything, Old Man Winter decided that we had been without snow for long enough and dumped two feet of it in 24 hours. While the Cap'n toiled in the blizzard to get the water running, I unhappily juggled shoveling through mountains of snow, cleaning rooms we didn't get to last weekend for lack of a babysitter, and watching Poopies. By the way, trying to clean a cottage while quelling every demand of an increasingly opinionated toddler, so as to avoid the constant complaining, is surprisingly exhausting and definitely enraging. Thomas & His Friends helped out quite a bit. And so the Cap'n and I worked and worried nonstop for four days. Plus, I'm sort of kind of getting really pregnant, which makes everything harder, more cumbersome, achey and tiring than normal.
Ultimately, the Cap'n saved the day by running a bypass to the cottage from---unbelievably---an outdoor faucet, run directly to the cottage's main water source pipe, which was insulated to the gills, and through which we've kept the water constantly moving by purposely sabotaging the flapper in the toilet, and causing it to leak. Ironically, the snow hides the line so that no one is the least bit the wiser. We didn't really think it was going to work. The test was the night before our guests arrived, when it got down to six degrees. We laid in bed from 4:30 to 5 am, not knowing the other was awake, wondering if we would find a useless ice-filled hose when we went to look. As the Cap'n went to check, I literally crossed every appendage, but given our luck this week, knew that he would return with pain in his face. Instead I got an exuberant thumbs up. We were downright giddy. Hugging, laughing. Like we'd won a prize, or something. Insanity. We were saved and so were the three reservations we had taken for the week, which would only just barely cover the cost of the materials. I still can't believe the Cap'n pulled it so well out of the fire. Bless this man, his ingenuity, and of course his plumbing skills.
Plus, we learned that our water rate has increased over 1000% to one of the highest in the country. I cannot even get started on that, except that we use a lot of it, and that it is a most unwelcome new expense.
On the personal front, we have still not decided on a name for the wee lass, which is bothering me for some reason, even though we have months left. We met so easily eye-to-eye on Poopie's name, it was an immediate home run. This time around it's not so simple. Partly because the Cap'n has a difficult last name to pair with any name ending in an "A" sound, which is a damned lot of them, and partly that despite stellar plumbing skills and good taste in practically every other regard, my husband seems to want either a poodle or a floozy for a daughter, and has come up with such winners as Trixie, Fifi and Lola. Me, I like Renee (sort of boring, but it sounds smashing with the last name), and Eden, which I love for purely non-biblical reasons. I have to put out there that while it's true that I hadn't heard of the latter name before coming to know about Mrs. Kennedy, and despite that I think that she is the coolest, it is not a "named after" situation. So, tell me what you think about these, if you care, if you dare.
