Brrrrr!!!

Sports have started and our Saturday mornings are effectively booked until June. Today was even busier than usual and Mr. at Home and I had our plan ready. Divide and conquer. He was taking K to her basketball game and I was taking L to a birthday party. Easy.

Right?

Yeah, it's never that easy.

Last night was one of the coldest we've had here. It was supposed to get down to either 14, 10, or 4 depending on who you believed. The girls bundled into footie pajamas with lots of blankets, quilts, and comforters and Mr. at Home and I sat up way too late watching TV. As we finally headed to bed, he commented that it was really cold. Like really cold. Colder than it should have been in the house.

He checked the thermostat and it really was colder than it should have been. None of the buttons seemed to elicit any response from the system. He checked the thermostat upstairs and it was completely blank. This was not good. Mr. at Home bundled up and headed outside to check the breaker box. After all, we seem to throw breakers around here a little too often. Nope, all the buttons were in the right position.

So what do you do when it's after midnight on the coldest night of the year and your heat is out? You find the emergency number! And then you decide you don't want to deal with all that drama, so you pull out the space heaters. You open all the cabinets and set all faucets to dripping. You put faith in the fact that you live in a townhouse and that your neighbor's heat with keep your house warm enough. Then you go to bed praying that you don't wake up to a flooded laundry room because the pipes froze and burst. When you wake up in the morning and everything seems okay, you praise God.

We were all up around 7, Mr. at Home called the heating company and they scheduled us between 10 and 10:30.

Remember that basketball game? And the birthday party? Yeah, our obligations were stacking up like planes over La Guardia. So I quickly got dressed, put both girls in the van and I took them both first to the game then the party. Mr. at Home stayed to deal with the heat. When I called him after the game, he couldn't even talk from being so cold. He had to get off the phone and grab some coffee and a space heater.

Turns out the installers "forgot" to install one of the transformers and the repairman brought down a whole mess of wires that were all exposed and touching each other causing the system to short. The guy took it to show his boss. He, thankfully!, got the system back up and running, but at one point his foot slipped off an attic joist and put a large crack in the girls' bedroom ceiling. They're coming back to fix it. Like I said, it's never easy. Maybe next time I'll tell you about how it took 2 months to fix my car. It includes all kinds of fun stuff that involved every related part being boxed wrong at the warehouse and some guy having to open every single box and compare the part inside to a picture of what we needed. On second thought, both I and the service department manager would just like to forget that ever happened.