Friday, February 11, 2011

last few weeks

Let me tell you about our last few weeks….. You might want to get a cup of tea, as it is a long story………
This month started well enough……… okay it started well for about 10 hours lol
In this part of the world we are unaccustomed to truly cold weather, we tend to freak out if we have to put coats on…… so when we heard a big storm was coming…. no one was really concerned about it, even though we were seeing what it was doing to the rest of the country. We tend to worry more about the 100 plus degree weather for weeks on end with no rain…….. you know desert and all……. until last week I have never seen snow last more than a day down here …..
So while we bundled up and got the extra heaters out of storage…. never once did I think to store water……..
Coming from Wisconsin I did know enough to try and keep our water from freezing, couldn’t do it….. froze while it was running……… it was coming out like a icy machine…..
Not only did our sink pipes freeze but our toilet lines did too……..we were some of the lucky ones…..our family next door were able to keep some of their water running…… and while our sink drains froze our toilets could still be flushed with buckets of water……..
One of the reasons we couldn’t keep our water from freezing besides the sub zero weather, was the power kept going out….yep we heat with all electric…..couldn’t even keep the gas oven on ( electric ignite )….. for two days between power outages Jorden keep it from going below 44 degrees with his candles… he was making them as fast as we were burning them……he keep a dozen or more candles going….and kept the cats away from them, not even a whisker lit up :d
Brent was also able to get more hay for his dogs and my sisters as well as my aunts dog. With the tarps, warmed up food and defrosted water, they did pretty good. Better than I thought they could be, when this all started we had just had a party at our place, the girls got so excited I thought we were going to lose them that day….Pretty Girl wouldn’t stop walking around for hours until her hips started to give out, and Coco wouldn’t stop trying to bark and was paying big time with her allergies……I should have realized they were having too much fun to slow down……the weather took care of that lol they are doing good now….
After three days of frozen pipes we saw how that clearly wasn’t the end of our issues…..as our pipes slowly defrosted…..the leaks started to show themselves……..
Over the course of the next few days Brent spent every minute he was awake trying to get us water……he was soaked to the sink more than once in below freezing temps crawling under our trailer in the dark most of the time….. We had a total of 5 breaks….most of them were the pipes split along the length of them……..as I said were are among the lucky ones……not only can Brent do work like that….but he had most of the parts to do it……it was only $30. for a few parts…….. It did cost him in his work hours as the whole town came to a stand still…… however we have water and some people in town still don’t…..everyone else had the same issues going on….the few parts Brent needed to fix things were hard to come by……stores were selling out of everything from water pipes to water…..the only time Brent stopped was to help fix my Dad’s furnace……
After a few days he got water to the yard so we didn’t have to haul it as far…another few days and he got it to the house……just past midnight……he was able to take a long bath and go to bed before Jorden woke him saying something was wrong….that Brent should turn off the water heater….. Brent couldn’t see any reason to do it but did it anyhow……..when we woke up he went out to look, the water pipe to the heater had burst while we were sleeping, we could have not only drained our propane tank but killed the water heater as well….pretty lucky in our eyes……after coming in soaked to the skin again he called his voice mail as he had missed a called while we were asleep…… that’s how he got the news his father passed away….
We are not going back to Wisconsin this time ……..…..and I must say another life and death trip across country didn’t sound like the best of ideas to me…..so we did our own little thing down here in honor…..
there is a good side to this as hard as it is to say, I believe his dad is happier now….he was in bad shape for a number of years
All of this is going down when we discover we are missing the guys “papers” good thing were not headed to Arizona lol …………they may have been tossed with some old mail…….good thing we don’t get a chance to take the trash to the dump yet, even better that it’s been pretty cold so not as many bugs to dig through lol ( knock, knock, knock ) so there is a bit of hope we still have them……. I can tell you for sure they are not in this trailer…..I have gone over every inch of it twice…. it wasn’t easy…..no water for a week can really trash a place……just coming up for air now…..
As of right now we are coming down with a cold… Jorden is right in the middle of his…….but it seems to be moving fast thank goodness for Reiki
Speaking of Reiki before I had Reiki I couldn’t stand the cold at all….. my knees would go out and I would be in such pain it was unbearably from the cold alone ( that’s one of the reason we left Wisconsin ) … while the last week or so was hard it wasn’t undoable I was cold but not in pain….
Going through things like this can make you take a good look at how your spending your time, getting things done……
We have decided to call off all but the next workshop out of Pi Yoga. Life is too short to spend a day or two of recovery after every workshop or share….. We are doing the master workshop as we have people signed up for it already and don’t want to go back on our word…..I would have been very upset if it happened to me lol
We have had a lot of fun working out of Pi, Ellen is great, we now count her as a friend……with these new hours of Brent’s we get about 3 hours of sleep before workshops and shares, that makes our allergies even harder to control, we end up getting very spacey…..than spend the next day or so unable to go about our everyday life as breathing becomes a issue…….it’s not that Pi smells bad, it smells great, it’s just that it smells at all lol we can only take a limited amount of any smell not just nasty smells……oh that would be so nice to only have to stay away from ugly smells……
We will still be doing Reiki workshops and shares but out of places we have more control over the environment and can do later hours…. ( I will not not spend time with Brent every night :D )
We will miss going to Pi….. We wish them well……
All in all I’m really looking forward to Spring :D