Brrrrrr.

Cold. Bitter cold hit my area this weekend. Temps were in the negative Teens.

I did what I was supposed to in the event of freezing temperatures. I ran a trickle of water in all of my faucets.

I didn’t count on our propopane furnace stopping…Stopping…Starting…Stopping…Starting.

Worried that this was a potential safety issue, I called a heating and cooling company. The first one was overwhelmed with work orders and couldn’t get to us. I felt sorry for them, to have to repair furnaces in freezing temperatures.

The second one I called fit us into our schedule. (They were able to call in extra help).

The repair tech came out and looked everything over.

It boiled down (like what I did there?) to the fact that our furnace, built for modular homes, was not intended to work in below-0 temperatures.

(Well, neither are most people.)

The repair tech left, after a bill for an emergency call (Ouch. But who can blame them? Again, freezing temperatures).

My brother loaned us a space heater and we got the temperature in the house raised. The furnace kicked in and stayed on.

In the meantime, however, the pipes to the shower and toilet in the master bathroom (the farthest away from the furnace) froze. Fortunately we have another bathroom with a working toilet and shower, but it wasn’t MY shower, and I didn’t want to use it. So I didn’t.

Then my brother (the most helpful person I know) came over and put the bullet heater on the pipes in the basement, thawing them out.

The heater worked on the pipes, unfreezing them.

This morning, I am thankful for a hot shower.

I’ve taken showers that were not hot and some that were in odd places.

Let me explain.

As a college sophomore, I went on a trip to Mexico with a school group. During our trip, we stayed in a small town and did some mission work.

The home we stayed in had a working bathroom, but you had to go through a gate into the backyard, where there were open stalls.
A privacy fence surrounded the yard, but you had to share the open space with a big pig (no lie!) and a rooster.

Needless to say, I used the bathroom for necessities, sparingly, but chose not to shower. Instead, I washed my hair under an outdoor faucet.

A few years later, I again visited Mexico, and this time stayed with a wealthy family. Their shower was tiled and open, and private. It was beautiful, but only cold water came from it. This was in the winter time, so it wasn’t pleasant.

Later, I shared an apartment in the city with two housemates. We had our own bedrooms and paid individual rental fees, but we shared a kitchenette and a bathroom with an antique clawfoot tub. No shower.

There was a shower available to us, but you had to go down the stairs, outside, into a back door, down another flight of stairs into a laundry room (that locked, thank goodness) where there was a shower stall.

All of these were odd situations, and looking back, these make me even more thankful for a private shower in my home with hot water.

At Christmas time ten or so years ago, our power went out. Family brought over a generator, on Christmas Eve, to help me out. Before they could plug it in, the power came back on, and stayed on.

We’ve been blessed in our neighborhood because the power company put in new lines a few years ago and a power outage, of more than a couple of hours, is rare.

The new reports say with this recent winter storm there were at least 7 deaths caused by weather. There were thousands of flights canceled and massive power outages. Indeed, I feel very blessed.

Wherever you are reading this from, I pray that you will find be safe, warm and have no ill effects from the storm.

Although this photo looks just like my cat, Elsa, this is not her.

But Elsa was named after the queen in the Frozen movie.

Seemed appropriate with the frozen temperatures and snow and ice.