It was hard enough to leave our family and delightfully comfortable temperatures (of 60s and low 70s) in Florida (where we celebrated Christmas), knowing the final destination (back home in good ole MN) on New Year's Eve would yield highs in the single digits.... but to walk in the house from the garage last night at 8:00pm STILL seeing our breaths. Well, that was a shocker!
It took a few more steps indoors to decide that it wasn't our imaginations : OUR HOUSE WAS FREEZING! The thermostat ultimately concluded just how freezing: 39 degrees Fahrenheit (so, technically above "freezing"). The boys had fallen asleep on the way home from the Minneapolis airport, where we flew in from Tampa, so here we were - still in our coats - walking in circles in a confuddled state of confusion as to what to do next... strip the boys down and put on their PJs (cruel!)? Try to put them to bed under a mountain of blankets (rustic!)? I decided, YES and YES to those questions. Thankfully, they each have electric heaters in their rooms, so we got those puppies cranking. Needless to say, frigid air certainly didn't aid the "drift seamlessly back into dreamworld" transition. But, with a little lovin, they went down. Meanwhile, Scott is playing detective with the furnace (mental image: Ralphy's dad in Christmas story)... actually, everyone we know is playing detective via phone (because, as we all know - God love him - Scott is not the handiest of handymen when it comes to home maintanence). The pilot light was out: originator of problem. How to get back on and stay on: still the problem at that point.
Scott is a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy (thank goodness I chose a spouse to balance me out!), so, when nothing else was working, he dialed up our favorite heating and plumbing guy, Mike ("favorite" by default, since he's helped us out of a couple of emergency plumbing and furnace troubles), at 8:30pm on New Year's Eve. Mike was convinced the description warranted a service call, so the Saint-of-a-man got his butt to our doorstep just hours before the dawn of 2010 to save us from frost bitten toes last night.
Problem fixed by 9:00pm.
Warmth restored to its fullest by 5:00am. That's how long it took to warm this mother up! Hot water heaters apparently are notorious for taking their sweet time. I'm guessing temps outdoors dropping to negative 2 (on a side note, would "temps" in its plural form be appropriate when we are talking about a number not MORE than one, but less than zero?) didn't help matters.
The Arthurs are up and running again. YEY!
This scenerio was all too familiar, as the return from our Christmas vacation of 2005 (pre-kids and in Ohio) provided us with the same freezing reception. Except WAY WORSE... the heat was off, a pipe had burst, and our home was in need of a 3-month lon restoration project from the water damage caused by the flooding.
One could say we were quite lucky our indoor temps didn't dip below that magical number (32) this time... still not sure exactly when the pilot light extinguished...
More later on our AMAZING trip! Love to all on this New Years Day 2010~
1 comment:
Isn't Florida funny that way. We went down to Sarasota probably around the same time you did. People were wearing parkas. I'm glad you got the pilot light back on. A good and reliable plumbing/heating person is a saint to have. Keep those tosies warm!!
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