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December 16 Fun with frozen pipesSo I get up this morning and go to wash up, and lo and behold I get no water at all out of my sink when I turn it to hot water... Yay for frozen pipes :( At least it's just the one sink.
Now, I'm perfectly capable of fixing things in my house, but being fairly new to this, I have no idea what I'm doing. I looked up a couple of remedies for frozen pipes on the Internet. There were recommendations for safely thawing exposed pipes, but if you have pipes behind a wall... one site said to call a plumber, and the other said to cut a hole in your wall in order to get access to the pipe. Oh noes :(
So I called my dad. He discussed several options with me - first off, shut off the water so that when the pipe thaws you don't have the potential for gallons of water leaking out. Since it's the hot water pipe that's frozen, shutting off the water heater will do it. I was very confused about shutting off my water heater until I realized it's an electric one and not gas - it's hard to find the gas shutoff valve when there's no gas going into your water heater. In my defense, "valve" isn't a very descriptive label, I have a gas furnace, and there are a lot of pipes coming out of my water heater :P I did end up shutting it off by turning off the water valve that leads to it, and also turning off the circuit breaker labeled "water heater" (you don't want to leave the heating element on if there's a possibility the tank might become empty). Hopefully whoever labeled the breaker was correct - I have no idea how to verify that (besides checking later whether the water heater is cold. Which it is. Good.)
Then, you can "wait and see" and make sure you're around at all times when the hot water is on (and there's a potential for leaking). Or, you can cut open your wall/floor and see if you can see your pipes. If you have plastic piping, you're probably fine because it has more capability to flex. I chose to cut open my wall, because I worry too much, and also because I'd rather know than wait and see and maybe need to cut open my wall after water has leaked all over everything. Anyway, it's a hole in the wall under the sink - nobody will ever see my first drywall repair job.
I did cut open my wall, and it turns out I have copper piping. Boo. The pipes didn't look like it had bulges, though, which is good. However, I could only see the pipe running along the wall - not the section that runs along the floor.
When I mentioned to my dad that the sink area stuck out from the rest of the house a little, he knew what was going on: the bottom hadn't been sealed properly. With the bottom unsealed and air getting in, the insulation doesn't work as well. That means that the piping along the floor is likely the frozen pipe. Which means that the hole in my wall really isn't useful. Sigh.
So I went outside to check out the cracks that are likely there, and also to see if maybe I could get a glimpse of my pipe (hopefully not). Now, I've always thought that the sink area was a little cold, but I was suprised by the size of the cracks there.
   Yes, that's a 1/2 to 1 inch gap, right there at the bottom of the overhang. Ouch. (The other black stuff running all the way along the house is my cable TV wiring - don't ask.)
Well, now I've got to decide whether to cut a hole in the bottom of my cabinets and also in my floor, preemptively. I'm not sure I will - that's a lot of work for something that may turn out to be unnecessary.
Update:
I've thawed out the pipe, and nothing seems to be leaking. Yay :) Hopefully it won't freeze again overnight, and then I'll just have some work to do for the summer to fix this up. November 16 The next insult for FableI just heard about Community Call: Insult the hero up on the Fable 2 blog. Looks like they're looking for a replacement for the insult from the last game. Could be fun! If only I could think of something interesting  Quote: We need a replacement for the tired old "Arseface" from the original Fable, as the Hero Title which you receive when you get enough NPCs to hate your guts. So, if any of you chaps and chappettes have some abusive and derisive ideas, now is the time to shout and share it with the team! Or rather post them in the comments of this blog (we are going to regret this aren't we?), and who knows, if it's enough the title might make it onto our shortlist! October 18 Procrastination!I ran across this interesting article on procrastination, and had to share. http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html Interesting things from the article: There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination. That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff. What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you? Anyway, had to share, since I do tend to procrastinate a lot - sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. It did make me think December 17 60+ hours without powerWashington and other places in the pacific northwest recently suffered from a large windstorm that left over 1 million people without power. (here's one article on this) I also lost power - from Thursday night to Sunday night. I didn't end up having to spend most of that time in my own house (thank goodness - it was cold), since we've got friends with power, a perfectly good car with gas, and several malls, etc. within driving distance. I'll take a picture of my trees that fell down once it gets lighter out and put them up, too. Update: pictures are up. Things I learned:
Things I'm thankful for:
Things I got to see:
I still don't have cable - I'll have to call somebody to see what's up with that. But I don't think it will kill me not to have TV for a few days. It's been an exciting few days - but I'm glad I took next week off so I can recover and finally get around to cleaning my house before my parents get here. I think I'll get started on that. August 07 Windows Live Spaces!I spent a lot of time fixing up the look and feel - so I hope you all love it as much as I do One of the other cool things we're doing is opening up the way to put gadgets on your space. It might be a bit before there are any up there that are compatible with spaces - so build one! Check out this post to the SpaceCraft to learn about building gadgets - I even have an idea for one I think I might try my hand at. I'll post here again if that ends up happening. And yes, we are aware of some issues that we're currently working to fix. The SpaceCraft has a post for this too, and that might be a more appropriate place for comments since I have been known not to check here frequently at times
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