I was in a mood. The Chargers had lost - apparently, the receivers found it difficult to catch the ball when it hit them in the hands - and though I'm not of those guys who dwell on such things, I was thinking that this might have been the year that they went to the Super Bowl. Bummer. Sports letdowns aren't debilitating to me; the loss is usually forgotten by day's end, but something about this hinted at bad things to come. The team was, on paper, better than the Pats. That they came up short should have been a warning to me. Bad things come in threes, don't you know.
We pulled into the driveway. It was dark, and as we stepped out of the car something was amiss. Mick was running around the yard, and there was an odd noise. A loud, wet hissing. "Something's going on in the back," Beth said. I walked through the garage and into the backyard.
Water. Everywhere. A wet, muddy, freaked out dog. It took a second to process.
A pipe, running from the bowels of the house into an outside spigot, had burst. Water was gushing out from the busted pipe into the yard; it appeared as if someone had installed a moat while we were away. I lost my shit - how the hell did I shut it off? I ran around the yard, looking for a valve of some sort; none to be found. I ran into the front yard - at one point I cut my left index finger, a deep cut, literally leaving a trail of blood behind me, on the gate to the fence, on the sliding glass door, finally on the shut-off valve in the front yard. It worked - the water stopped gushing out into the yard, but along with that it shut the water off in the rest of the house. It seemed that we were shit out of luck for water; there were no plumbers to be found at 6:00 on a Sunday night, and it occured to us that non-flushing toilets, paired with a substantial amount of pizza and beer consumed during the game, meant that it was going to be a long night. (Our first thought was that the dog had chewed through the pipe; upon watching the news, we figured it out - it had dropped below freezing two nights in a row, and the pipe had frozen and eventually cracked. Thus the dog was allowed to live.)
A long, cold night, as it turned out. The floodwaters held back, I went back into the house to dry my wet feet and wash off my bloody hand (ha! Wash it off? With no water!). I cranked on the heater. It made a sad whining noise. I made a sad whining noise. The sad whining noise was the first indicator that the thing was busted. The absence of warm air flowing from the vents was the second. I made another noise, one that rhymed with "phuq". The house was already cold; we love living there, but it has all the heat retaining properties of an aluminum tool shed. Parts of my mind were beginning to shut off for the evening. I went back outside and turned the water back on - had to, you see, to get water out of the sink; oh, and it turns out you can flush a commode when the water's shut off, you just have to manually fill the tank, which is a joyful experience, zippidee doo-dah. Hand thus washed and toilet flushed in the Roman style, I went back outside - say, is that ice on the sidewalk? By George, I think it is! Smashing! - and shut off the water again. Once back inside, I announced to the household - the dog was in attendance, but Beth and Lucas were both huddled under fifty pounds of blanket, so I had to raise my voice - that if anyone needed to use the shitter, to go outside and find a tree.
I collapsed onto the couch, pulled a fleece blanket over me, and clicked on the tube. In TV Land, terrorists had killed 900 Americans, and Jack Bauer was being turned over to them in an effort to appease their evil leader. And there was Jack, being led off of a plane, bearded, emaciated, bearing the physical and psychological scars from two years in a Chinese secret prison. Bauer, I thought, let me tell you about my day.
