Busted

This sopping wet floor greeted me after pipes froze upstairs under the kitchen sink, courtesy of the Polar Vortex, Round One. Pretty sure I caught it soon enough to avoid serious injury to the Ikea cabinets or bamboo floors, but the drywall ceiling Chris was in the middle of mudding might require some repair or a do-over.

Last year, winter was forever long but mostly mild, and it didn’t occur to me that I needed to do anything other than keep the heat turned on. But the thermostat is in a geothermal underground bunker, and apparently it gets a helluva lot colder upstairs with all those windows.

This year's Winter Cabinology Lesson: Turn off the water main, open the upstairs pipes, flush the toilet.

My friend, Paul, a builder-handyman, was with me when we discovered the frozen pipes (which actually are plastic tubes) on what turned into a frustratingly unfruitful trip. We had planned to start working on the shower pan, but we ran into problems there, too. Paul dug 2 feet under the floor and still didn’t find the drain, which meant I needed to call a plumber -- or worse, track down the builder.

Paul surveyed the damage to my kitchen faucet, reflected on our lost day and offered up a bit of pidgin Nigerian wisdom: “Na condition make crayfish bend,” he said.

Life’s difficulties piled on us this day. What can we do but accept it?