The Standoff

I think it got up to about 0 degrees yesterday.

When Spud went to sleep for his morning nap I went into the laundry room to wash a huge pile of towels that I we constantly have. Huge pile. Wet towels. I'm a towel nut apparently. The bin in the laundry for dirty towels in nearly always full or getting there.

I fill my front loader, put in the perfect (ahem) mixture of laundry soap and Oxyclean (how do I love thee Oxyclean??) Hit the magic sequence on the dashboard and I hear . . .

errrrrrr  errrrrr  errrr

Memory immediately tells me, frozen pipes.

Oh crapski!! Shiite and shinola! Why do I live here? It's freakin' cold! Damn and damnation!

Okay, I might have uttered a different set of words, but you get my drift.

I call Pup.

"The laundry room pipes are frozen!" I exclaim.

"Wha?" says my flummoxed Pup.

"Yes!" I repeat myself.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, you need to go downstairs, check the plugs, and plug in the heat tape."

My mind goes blank pretty much after, "Okay." Following complicated directions for taking care of the downstairs stuff flummoxes me! In the end, nothing I did helped and nothing was working and pipes remained frozen.

Grrr!!

Pup comes home. We discuss. He looks at me with his Pup-look. You might know a similar look. The look I myself might have when we discover the dog has poopied in the Big Room because we were gone too long. The look that says, I don't want to do what I know I have to do.

We stare at each other for a few minutes. Me with a determined look that says (and I might have even said this out loud), "I will not be schlepping dirty clothes to that horrible laundromat. Nope."

His stare says, "I won't, won't, won't crawl into that yucky place! I won't!" I swear I even saw his bottom lip poke out for a second or two.

Pup has this look because he knows he has to crawl into a crawl space under our dining room. It's kinda horrible there and I wouldn't want to do it.

He makes a few calls. Asks for a bit of advice. He runs to hell the Home Depot. Comes home with a solution. He schleps all of it downstairs where I hear about 20 minutes of, "Crapski! Shiite and shinola! Why do we live here? It's freakin' cold! Damn and damnation!"

You all know I'm lying. His language is colorful and peppered with things that would make a sailor blush (hey, why do we assume sailors swear like hell? Hmm . . . wondering . . . )

This morning, I wander into the laundry room, try the water, PLONK! It's running and the towels are washing as I write.

Oh I love that man. That pouty, don't-want-to-do-it man!

Honestly, I hate cleaning up after the dog and totally get it. Some adult tasks are horrible!

Smooches and how you stayin' warm?