The, uh, "Blessings" of Homeownership

Woo-hoo, it's 2011!!
So far, we've had two major systems in our house go on the fritz.
And it's only the 3rd of February.
Looks like it's gonna be an interesting year.

Last week, the heater went out on us. I got up Wednesday morning and thought it was a bit brisk in the house. (55 degrees). I played with the thermostat and reassured by the "firing-up" sound, figured it was a fluke. About 10 minutes later, I woke up enough to realize the heater was not actually blowing anything warm into the house and the thermostat should Never let it get to 55 degrees .
The DH stayed home to meet and greet the Heater-repair-heroes. They reviewed our trying-to-come-on heating unit that would abort actually blowing out any heat after roaring to life over and over again. They had to get parts and came back the next day (again hosted by the DH) to repair the closet dragon and gift us with the balmy 64 to 68 degrees we normally range within.
Yep, we aren't into the indoor Greenhouse effect.
As Brenda Dane says in her "Cast On" Podcast: "If you're cold, put on a sweater. That's what they're for."

Living in Arizona, I can be subject to getting a leetle smug about our usually tame "Winter" weather. I really try not to, but it just comes out every now and again. I'm human. 

Karmically...Mother Nature has a sense of humor.
A week after the heater adventure, we're experiencing record low temperatures in Arizona.
Yes, we did cover the plants and the exposed pipes....but Not enough. Not nearly enough.

It was still below freezing at 11 AM this morning. 
We'll see what survives from my patio-garden. (Usually the "foreign" plants from back east come right back but the local stuff keels over big time after a freeze.) Most every plant back there looks pretty unhappy.

When I couldn't get water out of the pipes this AM, I checked the news and online and heard our local water company was having issues with the electronics freezing at the water pump stations.
I checked outside and didn't see any obvious issues so I figured the Water Company was the culprit.
Until I called the neighbors across the way. They had frozen pipes and their next-door neighbors had running water from functioning plumbing.
I took another look outside and noted a split in a bulbous trap-thingy at the bottom of the bizarre maze of pipes that stick into and out of our house on the North West corner.
(The previous owner of the house was a do-it-yer-self-er. The kind that makes professional electricians and plumbers blanch when they view his handiwork.)

I realized the day was going to be a lot more interesting than I had originally thought.

I called into work to report that I'd be staying home to monitor pipes and wait for the repair gent.
We consulted with the Plumbers that had visited us in November for a blocked drain. They said they couldn't do anything until the pipes thawed. I noted that I'd like to get on the visit-list since it was obvious we'd need assistance with the geyser when the pipes thawed.
Our lovely neighbors across the way gifted us with experienced opinions and jugs of water.
We put a heater out to blow on the pipes and hustled the thawing process with a blow dryer. Three big 'ol cracks made themselves known and I checked back with the Plumbing company to get on the active visit list since things were thawed and leaking (yes, leaking around the closed-as-we-could-get-it water main valve).

The plumber-hero turned up less than a couple of hours later and cut and capped off three sections of the pipe-maze:

(Arrows show where Ice was found creeping out of the seams.)

He advised me how to insulate the pipes some more and we plotted for him to return in a couple of weeks to finish putting the pipe-maze to rights.
I made a trip to the plumbing supply store where the haggard clerk was having a gonga sales day (A LOT of people had busted pipes) but he was still in good spirits and very kind.

Well, we'll see what happens next. The blessings of homeownership abound.
I still feel blessed to have a roof over my head....ooohh - that's one of the big things we haven't replaced in this house yet.
And there's a lot more of 2011 to come...
(Yes, that realization really did hit me as I was gonna reference back to a positive blessing of homeownership...{sigh})