Cold weather, Frozen pipes, Belgium, & an indoor slide (crazy long post, I know)

I don’t have many pictures to share from the past week. Nothing too exciting happened, though today was a different story. It started at a quarter to 6 this morning. Jared had to be out at “The Site” early to work on some things for an experiment they are trying to get out. “The Site” is the facility out in the dessert where all the reactor and testing take place. It is about 45+ minutes from our home. The road in the winter is not the best road to drive on. Jared usually catches the bus from the office building, especially during the winter. Anyway, it was well below zero last night and in that cold of temperature, his diesel car wouldn’t start. He tired for sometime to warm it up and even had me get up to help him jump start the car. I offered him the van but he didn’t want RJ being upset missing preschool. So I got up and went to use the bathroom, that’s when we learned that the pipe to the toilet was frozen. This made me quit upset since Jared was in a hurry to get to work and was scheduled to leave that afternoon for Tennessee. The toilet of course disposed of the waste but the pipe to refill the tank was frozen. So we put a space heater by the wall where the hose entered the house and decided to refill the tank with water from a bucket when we needed to, and of course prayed that the pipes wouldn’t bust while Jared was out of the state. Just before 7am Jared decided to take the van. He was already late and couldn’t afford to be much later. I promised RJ that we would call someone to pick him up for preschool, after he became upset at the thought of missing preschool.

At 8:30am I called RJ’s preschool teacher to get the name of the mother that lived close by to ask for a ride. She told me not to worry about it. She was just about to call all the mothers and let them know that school was canceled. The School District had canceled school on account of the cold weather. Many buses had a hard time starting. And even though she does preschool out of her home, she still follows the District’s schedule. So it ended up being a blessing not having Jared’s car start. We didn’t need the van anyway and since he was driving out to “The Site” I would much rather him be driving the van then the car. But we still had a problem with the pipes.

Jared came home just after 1 to switch cars and get ready for the airport. While he was home he figured out why the pipe froze and why we have had on and off problems with the washing machine line freezing. It seems someone had put vents for the foundation right next to the lines for both the washing machine and the toilet so nothing but cold air was hitting those lines. We then moved the space heater outside to blow into the vents in hopes of defrosting the line so we could further fix problem.

(Switch topics for a sec.)

Here is the exciting and overwhelming news. Jared is going to a meeting in TN to meet with the Belgium people they have been working with. Jared will be going to Belgium soon to work on their fuel development. It still hasn’t been decided for how long yet. At first it sounded like we all will be going for a few months and then it sounded like Jared will be going for a week here and week there. Well, when Jared came home this afternoon he told me that it looks like we will all be going and the Belgium’s want us to come now. Of course I am completely overwhelmed by this news thinking that it wasn’t going to happen at all and if it did, it wouldn’t happen till April.

I took Jared to the airport at 3pm to fly to TN. (His car still didn’t start). He has his meeting in the morning and will be discussing more details then. I should hopefully know what is going on tomorrow. Are we all going? When? And how long? And of course, what are we going to do with the house and everything? Any one want a dog?

And about our pipes, once we got home from the airport and library, I checked the toilet and it looks like the line is de-thawed! A friend is supposed to be coming by tonight to help cover the vents so the problem won’t occur again while Jared is away.

So here are some photos from last week of our indoor side. The kids loved it even thought it didn't work too well. The large box came from a futon we just bought for the extra room we built upstairs. Now we have a place for guests to stay when they visit. Too bad I didn't know about Belgium before. Not many guests will be coming to visit now and I could have used the money to get our passports. Jared has his, we knew he was going to Europe for sure some time this year. But now the kids and I need to start looking into getting ours which is about $100 a piece. You do the math.