So you think you know cold?

This morning I stumbled downstairs to get ready for work and nearly jumped back in bed in one bound. There was no way I could've braved the temperatures on our first floor in just a pair of shorts.

For good reason. It was -7 degrees (F) outside with a wind chill below that, and my 116 year old house wasn't up to the task of keeping out the weather.

When we bought the long-vacant house last year we converted the unfinished second floor into four bedrooms, all insulated, with new windows and a separate high efficiency furnace.

With the mandatory exception of the bathroom we didn't have the money to do more than surface work to the main floor. And so we face the cold spell with drafty old windows and warped window frames, uninsulated walls more than a century old, screen doors not worth a damn, and main doors so old and past their prime that you can feel the breeze through the wood of the door.

Oh, and a furnance that is honest and truly a few years older than I am.

So I went to work and a few hours later my wife called me to complain about the heat. It was, at the time, 56 degrees on the main floor with a steady draft from all angles. And this with the furnace and a space heater on full blast.

"Keep the kids upstairs," I said, knowing the upstairs was a toasty 71 degrees.

"Look, I know this sounds ghetto," my wife said, "but there's no TV upstairs. There's no way your children are going to stay entertained and calm for 8 hours without at least a little Hannah Montana"

'Tis true. I recognized the wisdom of her words. And yet worse was to come. An hour or so later she called to say that the kitchen faucet no longer worked; the pipes had frozen.

So on the way home I stopped at Home Depot and bought some magnetic vent covers. When I got home I used them to double-seal the vents in the basement and made sure the vents on the 1st floor were open and clear. I called my friend The Socialist who quickly came to my rescue with both advice and a space heater that he set up by the water supply line to thaw out the pipes. I did a patchwork job of closing a dining room window that had jiggled loose and was open 1/4th of an inch.

Within a few hours the temp was up to a balmy 65 degrees. Heaven!

Here's a pic of the baby as she dealt with the cold. Keep in mind this is how she was dressed inside all day.

* * * *

YaYa is selling Girl Scout cookies for Brownies. All interested parties in Milwaukee (who know us) may feel free to contact me for some boxes. Her goal is 150, enough to earn a radio, and so far she is up to 51 after an audacious door to door campaign in this weather! and a telephone sales pitch worthy of a telemarketer.

This burst of entrepreneurial spirit almost makes up for the fact that she and her friend used LuLu's closet rod as a chin up bar and ripped one end right out of the drywall. I swear, keeping the house merely INTACT with four kids around is a chore.

* * *

Random thought:  you know, in the storm that heralded this cold spell's arrival the wind was so strong that it tore our front gate right off? I mean just shorn it off, like a grizzly bear had come and given it a good wallop. Crazy. One more thing to fix, like we needed that.

* * *
I took all the kids to pick up two kid-friendly digital cameras that were on clearance at a local store. I told them they couldn't use them until we fixed the sound on the computer, which is a crock. I'm hoping they actually forget about them long enough to pass them out for their birthdays.

Why would I take them along? Wasn't that counter-productive and foolish given that I was picking up gifts for them? Sure. But I was trying to buy good conduct time with my wife so that I could watch the game in peace.

* * *

At the store I also picked up some Littlest Pet Store pens that came with a tiny car that was RC controlled by a pair of buttons on the pen. Weird but true. Anyway, LuLu's worked great but YaYa's must have had a bum battery. Cue tears and fireworks from YaYa. Thankfully her sister volunteered to borrow her pen out for a few minutes to solve the dilemma.

Later LuLu runs into the dining room claiming her's had stopped working as well. .

"Arrgghhh! It's not working anymore and I don't like it. It's a stoopid car and I hate . . oh, nevermind. It's working", she said. She then smiled, turned, and walked out the door.

I laughed hard enough to not even correct her use of 'stupid' and 'hate', both of which are verbotten around here.

Tags: YaYa, LuLu, cold