(thanks to Nathan's friend Maggie Alvarez for this lovely photo from nearby Sells, AZ)
It's been cold in Tucson the last few days. I mean REALLY cold. Here's how my Thursday & Friday went down:
I woke up early Thursday morning, and I could tell by the heater going full blast that it was extra cold outside. I know, I'll make some nice warm yummy oatmeal for everyone was my first thought. So I put a pot underneath the faucet & turned it on. About a cup of water came out, then...nothing. I jiggled the faucet, turned on both hot & cold water, the works. Nada. I started roaming through the house, trying every faucet I came across...nothing. Our pipes had frozen.
Slight panic set in...this kind of thing is not supposed to happen in southern AZ, even in February. So, I called my in-laws, who live in nearby Green Valley, to ask their advice. As luck would have it, they were over at our new house, making sure the pipes hadn't frozen there (they hadn't. How weird is that--the much larger, empty house with no heat still had water, but our cozy little home froze up while our heat was going full blast all night?). They told us to aim a hair dryer at the water main to thaw the ice, and they'd be right over.
Great. Except I don't own a hair dryer. Wait! I thought. Our portable space heater should do the trick. Except Nathan had already moved the space heater over to the new house, where it was sitting uselessly in the garage. Oops. Time to wake up Nate & send him running while I tried to wake up the girls, comb their hair (with a dry hairbrush, thus resulting in crazy frizzy hair), order them to use the potty but not to flush the potty, thus undoing months of training, and get Lorelai ready for her ride to school.
While all this was happening, Nathan and his father arrived with the space heater and an extension cord (we don't own one of those either. Ugh...and we think we're ready to be homeowners???). This is one of those big, scary-looking 70s-era space heaters, with the heat coils exposed to air. The sucker works, though. We clumsily strung it across the front of our house, to the water main on the west side of our home. It had some token foam wrapped around it, but only a thin layer; otherwise it looked pitiful and exposed, sticking directly out the side of our house for a few feet before descending underground.
(For those of you not in the know, having aboveground water pipes is very common in Arizona homes. Normally, it's no big deal--after all, we're located in a desert in the southern United States. It's not like these pipes will be exposed to sub-freezing temperatures, like 15 degrees or anything, right? Oh, wait a minute...)
We cranked up the heat and sat there, watching, for several minutes. At one point, Nate thought he saw the foam insulation start to melt. Now, that would have been a lovely complication! At last, just before 8:00 in the morning, SUCCESS! Our indoor faucets started to sputter, then run smoothly. Yay--Nate could shower and go to work! I threw on my grubbies, left Celeste & Aurora at a friend's house, and ran over to check on the new house.
Grandma & Grandpa Barrett spent all morning at the new house, waiting for our new refrigerator & stove to arrive, as well as doing several minor repairs. They, like me, spent the whole day in coats & hats, since the house had no heat yet (it barely topped 50 degrees the whole day, inside the house!). After checking out the new appliances, I sensed an opportunity to get some moving done myself. I picked up the girls from my friend's house and brought them over to the new house for Grandma to watch, while I loaded up all our food storage into the van and moved it into the storage closet of our new home.
However, while I was still loading my many, many cans of wheat/oats/rice/pasta/etc into the back of the van (wearing gloves & a hat, cheeks red from the crazy cold wind), I got a phone call from Lorelai's charter school. They were closing for the day, effective 11:30 am! All of their pipes had frozen as well, and it was a health hazard to keep the kids there any longer. Ugh...I would have to hurry! I threw together a lunch for my kids, finished loading the food storage in the car, drove to the new house, unloaded my kids' lunch only (by now it was 11:20 am), then sped over to Lorelai's school to pick her up. Then I dropped off our carpool partner at her house, then headed back to the new house. By this time, Aurora had cried herself to sleep and Celeste was bouncing off the walls. Grandma put both kids into my arms and took off for lunch with their friends--they'd been working all morning and needed a break.
Thank goodness for portable DVD players. After a (cold) lunch, I turned on How To Train Your Dragon, and the kids sat on the couch and watched it, still in their coats & hats, and with a blanket thrown over them for good measure. I spent the next hour and a half hauling boxes in from the frigid garage into the storage closet, and arranging them more or less to my satisfaction. By the time the movie was over, I was done! Hooray. Now I was just cold and tired, not cold, tired and busy. Then I hauled the kids back home just in time to start dinner. That night, Nate & I made sure to leave a few faucets dripping--it was supposed to be almost as cold as the night before.
Just before bedtime, the school called. NO SCHOOL TOMORROW! That's right, folks, Arizona actually had a snow day--but I'm not going to show you any pictures of it. Well, except for this one...
I won't bother showing more pictures of the Big Pima County Freeze of 2011, and you know why? They won't convey how cold it really was. All you'd see are blue, clear skies, and lots of sunshine--just what you see on any given day in most pictures of Arizona. And yet...the high for Thursday was only 38 degrees, and the low was a frigid 15! Both temperatures are new records...it hasn't been that cold in Tucson for over a century!
I can hear all my friends up north (or "back East") poo-poohing our wussiness. Go ahead, snicker all you want. It's true, we're all a little thin-blooded from living in the hot desert. However, it's also true that Arizona infrastructure is not designed to handle weather like this (see: the exposed water mains on houses mentioned above). There are no gutters on streets, not much insulation in homes...I could go on. So, when Arizonans panic like this, keep in mind that it's not just the cold weather that frightens us...it's our own unpreparedness for emergencies of this nature. By contrast, how would everyone else in the country handle it if they had 100 straight days over 100 degrees? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Which brings me to Friday. Luckily (on a personal level), my Friday was less crazy than my Thursday. I did drive all over creation shopping and taking kids to playdates, but that was all part of my plan. Plus, I got a warm shower! That's more than can be said for the approximately 19,000 homes & businesses in Pima County that have been stuck without heat for the last few days. The gas lines can't handle all the extra heat being used! The water companies are no better off, taxed to their limit dealing with all the broken pipes in the area. Worst yet, two people have reportedly died from exposure to the cold. In Arizona?? It's just not supposed to happen here.
It's been a rough 2011 so far in Tucson. On January 8, (as you've probably heard) Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, along with almost 2 dozen others, was shot in a Safeway parking lot by a gun-toting terrorist nutcase. Six people died. Regardless of political affiliation, it was a horrific, shocking day, that left the whole city shaken. Then, on January 31, a Pima County Sheriff's Department helicopter crashed into a mountain in northwest Tucson, killing the pilot & injuring 3 others.
Of course, since bad things come in threes, Mother Nature decided to get into the act--and send Tucson its lowest temperature in about, oh, a CENTURY or so. And thus, the Great Freeze of 2011 completes the Trifecta of Terror. While perhaps not as tragic as the first two events, the freeze has affected far more people and is going to be talked about for years to come. And people are still without heat and/or water as I'm writing this! Wow.
So, while I myself don't mind the cold once in a while, one freeze is enough for me. Dear Mother Nature: thanks for the fun change of pace. Now can we go back to having normal weather for a while??
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