Why I hate the winter. Reason #392.

We awoke this morning to our weather thermometer reading 3 degrees and dropping steadily. Yeah, that's 3 degrees! That's unholy! Any temperature where I would die if I stood outside for an hour is just not right!
Anyway, that's pretty much par for the course right now, but this morning was even worse. Cody went to the Boy Bathroom downstairs and found the hot water wouldn't turn on. Oh yes, our pipes were frozen! In Florida if it gets cold enough, every news channel around says to run your pipes, but here we all have (us included) basements so there is typically no need. Except if you have an above ground addition. Apparently sometime within the last 30 years, everyone got tired of only having one bathroom so someone went around to all the city houses and offered to build "additions." So all these great brick city homes (ours included) now have a huge vinyl sided wart on the back side, where a room and a bathroom were added. We love the additional space and wouldn't have purchased the home without it. From the inside you can hardly tell it's not like the rest of the house (except it's carpet and doesn't have 100 year old moulding) but from the back it's a huge white wart on our brick house. Anyway, naturally said wart/addition was built above the ground, as they didn't bother to extend the basement out. So the pipes to the whole house are run through the basement (where it is cold but above freezing), but then there are those few pipes that exit the basement, run outside and under the addition bathroom. Normally we think to run the water in that bathroom, but last night being the Super Bowl and all, it didn't strike us. So sure enough the damn pipes froze - actually just pipe - the hot water no less.
Anyway, so when Cody got home tonight he made me stand in the freezing basement and hold my hairdryer to the pipe for what seemed like a very long time, while he went and closed up some outside vents that go under the addition. Then he took over with the hair dryer after I gave up (my words were something like "just call a damn plummer already"). Well, sure enough his crazy plan worked and the pipes are now working again. So we're running the water all night and hoping they didn't burst (we briefly checked but it was dark and cold so we'll do a better job of checking tomorrow).
I gotta hand it to the guy, he's quite resourceful, and determined, and crafty when he needs to be. I guess that should be reason #392 why I love Cody too.