Living in the Cold

At zero degrees Celsius stuff, water in particular, freezes. And so we have some issues of living in a cold place. When I arrived at my house in Nakusp there was the pep talk. Fire place. Fire wood – two types. This one burns fast. This one, with the white bark, burns slower. You’ll work it out. Here is the laundry – see this tap is dripping – see that? It will stop the taps freezing.

My 2012 house, laundry is upper left

Okay. My laundry is on a landing, you walk through it to enter the house. Underneath the landing is open; it’s where the fire wood is stacked. Because it’s open it’s not insulated like the rest of the house and cold air, sometimes very cold air, swirls below it and causes the air, and the water, within this laundry to get very cold. When this happens – say ten degrees below outside - the water in the ‘S’ bend below the laundry tub freezes. This is the start of bad stuff. Because the drain is frozen one must turn off the dripping tap. [The dripping tap that keeps the pipes from freezing.] When the tap is turned off, the pipes freeze.  Now you can’t do laundry. Your clothes are dirty – perhaps smelly.

So, solutions? First warm the room with a heater. Some 12 hours later the pipes have unfrozen. Hurrah. So laundry time… The washing machine is on chugging away nicely. Dirty clothes are transforming pleasantly. Life is good.

Or so one thinks. Sitting inside away from the cold laundry one suddenly starts to hear water; gushing, splashing water. From the drainage outlet from the washing machine water is spraying everywhere. Rapidly – because that’s how I move and think – I grab the outlet hose and ram it into the laundry tub which rapidly fills. As it rapidly fills I see, with some horror, that it is not rapidly draining out. Not rapidly at all. Not, as it happens, at all. And the tub, too, overflows. It seems, I quickly reason, that the S bend is not yet fully thawed and soapy, soon to become ice, water is spreading rapidly over my freezing laundry floor and there is naught that I can do to stop it!

My 2012 car

But I must do something. So I attack the tub water with a bucket, charging out to the snow and ice covered porch, water splashing from the bucket onto me, the laundry floor and the snowy porch in equal measure, and then pouring the small puddle of remaining liquid onto the snowy ground below to the obvious amusement of the neighbours. This was the initial strategy – a strategy that needed multiple repeats. Next was mopping the floor with a troupe of towels.

Disgusted I tossed the damp towels onto a chair on the porch – needless to say they too quickly froze.

Good news though tomorrow it will be washing day again as the temperature thankfully rises over zero for the first time for a couple of weeks.

My classroom view

Yay.