Last weekend was wonderful: the weather was beautiful (in the 60's on Saturday, and approaching 70 on Sunday). I had some warning that all was not well on Sunday, considering I woke up whining in discomfort (and I don't whine), and it didn't get better all day. But the weather was gorgeous.
And then...
Then.
The warmest it got on Monday was at midnight. Then around two or three, the oncoming weather system hit, and the temperature started dropping. And dropping. And then it started sleeting and snowing while the temperature kept dropping.
I'm thankful that the two days of really nice weather meant that the half to 3/4 inch of ice and snow we got didn't stick, but...this morning when I woke up, I still checked email to see if the kids had school or not. (They did.) Because it was forecast to have gotten down to 14 degrees this morning. (It was actually 11 degrees when I got up at 6:30, according to the weather report--it's usually a few degrees colder here.)
The fireplace heater and space heaters in the bedrooms almost managed to keep up overnight, but not quite. Yeah, the heat pump kicked on, and that means the emergency heating elements had to be used. I'll see what I can do today to keep it from happening again.
I did a lot of baking last night. Supper tonight is going to be made in the oven--I'm making tortellini pasta bake. I use the dried tortellini you can buy in the pasta aisle at Walmart--usually get the spinach and cheese, because it sneaks extra veggies into the imp, who doesn't like most veggies.* It's like normal pasta bake, but bakes longer--about ten minutes longer before you pull it out and add the cheese.
Tomorrow's supposed to be back up to 40.
In the meantime, we're waiting on the plumber to get back to us--our sump pump went out last week, and we found out on Friday that that was installed all the way wrong, too--wrong pump, wrong kind of pump, and not hooked up correctly to either power or the drainage. I got a quote, and it's doable. Not comfortable, but doable. He just didn't have what he needed to get it fixed Friday, and didn't know when he'd have the time in his schedule to get back out here to us.
He did leave us with a loaner pump.
But yeah, Odysseus is right--they're probably swamped with emergency calls from people that didn't take precautions against frozen pipes last night. I'll count myself lucky if I hear from them by tomorrow.
23 minutes ago
Baked goods are always nice in cold weather! And at least you HAVE a loaner pump, so that is something.
ReplyDeleteThey got out yesterday, late morning, and got the pump replaced. They said they actually did NOT have masses of emergency frozen pipes calls like they were expecting. The kid said most of our water problems come from the fact that the discharge pipe doesn't go far enough from the foundation, and it comes right back in. I've got some ideas on how to fix that for the gutter downspouts, and Odysseus thinks he can dig something to lead the water away from where it's settling.
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