The battle of the pipe and other Christmas stories

Well it's been a memorable Christmas for sure.

I was more tired than I thought I was—a lot more tired. Thankfully my hand pain is gone after some enforced rest, and the rest of me is mostly recovered as well.  And a good thing too! We had a pretty normal Skype-all-the-grandparents Christmas, and then things got adventurous.

We've become the caretakers for the empty houses here over the winter. In the big triplex down the hill one family is still living, but here up the hill it's us and four empty houses. Draining the water out of all their pipes (a technique that would allow you to shut off the heat in an empty house) wasn't possible, so they're all being heated to 55 degrees or so. Nobody thought it was going to be a big deal—we were in for another mild winter, we all thought. Yeah.

Not so much.

The Christmas season was merry, all right, but it was also a constant war against the cold, which we mostly thoroughly enjoyed winning. Going down the hill twice a day to light fires in the wood-burning furnace of the big house, to keep it from freezing while the other family was away from Christmas; pulling a

The boy's first artwork

wagon through the fierce cold to the far woodpile to keep our own woodpile stocked. Then coming home and playing swordfight with the Boy, who just got his first wooden swords and is obsessed with being Saint George and killing dragons. (He's also having his first art experience, thanks to his aunt and uncle who sent him a paintbox. I never could get him to color, but he likes to paint between the lines with me guiding his hand.) We could feel the cold pressing in at the windows, but we kept our homefires burning and our Christmas lights lit, and the Boy danced to fiddle reels on our Irish Christmas music CD. (He can't keep his feet still during them. Must be in his blood!)

The-e-en the pipes started to freeze.

There's a weakness in the plumbing system here, a spot near the pump that supplies the whole complex where the pipe is too narrow and exposed. It used to freeze up about once per winter. Now, with less usage and such harsh cold (and with the house that sits over that spot much less heated) it started freezing up daily. The week after Christmas, turning on a water tap felt like Illinois roulette. Water? No water? Great, I was gonna take a shower… The only thing to do for it was to go over to the empty house, boil about a gallon of water in the bunch of assorted kettles we gradually gathered there, then go pour it little by little over the relevant place in the pipe.

The homefires

My favorite moment in the great pipe battle of '17 (it was done by the time '18 rolled around, thank God) was the second time the pipe froze up. Paul had fixed it the first time of course, being a champion at taking responsibility and also “the fixing man” as the Boy would say. But the second time it happened I was home alone. Hm. Wait, or take initiative? He had told me in great detail the story of how he'd fixed it… but as for the placement of the pipe, I only knew it was “under the house.” My first assumption about placement turned out to be wrong—I could tell, because there were no tracks in the snow there! I followed the well-beaten trail I did find into a shed built into the back of the house, and behold, there were many bootprints in the dust in front of a low square door. I got the water flowing again, and very much enjoyed telling Paul how I'd tracked him to the place.

It got less fun the next day when it happened again; we took turns fixing it for the rest of the week until Cal, the pastor who's involved in the Hungry World Farm project and is also an electrician and all-round handyman, came by to see what he could do for a longer-term fix. I ended up contributing to that one, too: my string of outdoor lights (little incandescent bulb in flexible plastic tubing), which I normally use as a cheap alternative to the kind of heating mat greenhouses put under certain seed trays to aid germination, is now wrapped around that pipe with insulation and plastic wrapped around it. Just enough warmth to keep things flowing. The battle is won! For now…

This one is Beowulf

Well, I know this is more like a family letter than a blog post, sorry. I'm still working on getting out of vacation mode. (I was so tired, you guys.) The race to the finish for my deadline was stressful and complicated (due to more factors than just the deadline… I'll tell you someday), and after it I checked out completely. It honestly took days of lying on the couch before I felt myself again.

But one more thing I want to leave you with! One of our Christmas presents from Paul's mom was a CD of Paul's grandmother, originally from Hungary, talking about the Hungarian dances that several families used to do together every month when she was a girl. (Our kid's got more than one kind of dance in his blood!) We listened to the CD one night during family time, and the next morning I asked the Boy (since he's curious about languages) if he wanted to know what Hungarian sounded like. We went on Youtube and discovered this incredibly charming little kids' cartoon series based on a book by Hungarian author Erika Bartos. It's about these tiny bug kids (the main characters are a ladybug and a snail) and their adventures in their little forest world, and it's the most wholesome, colorful, fascinating-to-young-children thing you ever saw. And it's translated into English too! The Boy and I were so charmed, though, that before we discovered that fact we watched about fifteen episodes in Hungarian…

In Hungarian:

In English: