Raining -> Pouring

The time was 7:00 PM. It was frigid and windy out, and had been all day. We had just returned from dinner at Terri's Mom's and were tired and shivering and looking forward to an evening of doing nothing much. Upon entering the house, my first instinct was to check the baseboard heaters to make sure they were warm, and therefore, on. But ho ho ho - lo and behold, they were not. Cue: Aaron's rage against the house (which on any given day is only about one seemingly innocuous issue away from surfacing)...

The thing about Aaron's rage against the house (TM) is that is really clouds my judgment/ability to think logically. Reason? Pfft. My only thought is "boy, I cannot wait to get out of this place someday". Meanwhile, somewhere in the aged piping that loops and zig-zags around the main level of our home sat a chunk of ice that could, at any second, rupture said piping and fill our walls with water. The race against time and the relative volume of water in its solid state was on - and I'm-a feeling sorry for myself. Go!

This happened once last winter; I winged it, and was eventually successful in saving our home from soggy ruin. This year, given my previous successes, I thought I should know what I was doing, which made my confusion and slow, trial and error-type progress all the more frustrating. See ARATH (TM) above. I stared at the furnace feeling dumb, and began opening and closing valves, listening for the rattling and feeling the temperature of the return pipes. Eventually I figured to bleed off all of the water ahead of the blockage, which we soon identified as being somewhere in the far side of the house, between the washroom and the garage. Note: that last detail is only important to this telling of the story in that it lead to Terri and I clumsily taking an exacto knife to the walls of the garage in a late-night effort to find the damned frozen pipe, and take a blow dryer to the bastard (spoiler: we were not successful in anything but making a mess and future work for ourselves).

I should note, for your own visualization, that throughout this entire process I was wearing my work clothes from the day - all wrinkled and disheveled, with big wet patches on my knees and dust splotches on my chest and sleeves. Oh, and if you look closely, it would be easy to trace the tracks of my tears.

Space heaters and blow dryers were placed in position, and I began to bleed water from each register, because I recalled this being important last time. After a long, painful discussion, we both agreed that this was useful to keep the water moving (albeit slowly) and potentially (but not likely) to introduce the hot furnace water to the blockage.

And this was our night. Until 3:30 AM. Moving heaters around. Bleeding the registers. Taking shifts. Arguing. Building new, better houses in our heads. Preparing ourselves mentally to stay up all night. Oh! and blowing a fuse at around 2:00 AM, nearly taking ARATH (TM) to another level. The low point of the evening was either said fuse failure, my clumsy attempts at fixing the fuse situation in a black garage full of miscellaneous junk, or... Terri falling asleep on the toilet with a hiking lamp on her head and a blow dryer raging at her feet.

Today, the heat was cranked to uncomfortable, oil bill be damned. And we were both here to experience every minute of said hot discomfort. On the plus side, I was able to successfully change out a fuse from a frustratingly unlabeled panel, operating a hitherto unopened Christmas multimeter like my old university self. So, there's always that...