It is cold. Very cold. Even the sky looked cold this morning when I left the house. It was 27 degrees outside, with a windchill of 9 degrees. NINE. Wussy south Texas or not, 9 degrees is COLD, y’all. I know it is even colder in the rest of the country, but that doesn’t make 9 degrees feel any warmer.
Jose and I debated whether we needed to take any action to protect our pipes or plants, but in the end, the only thing we did was bring our potted plants inside. If the stuff in the flower bed dies, I won’t be upset because we are planning to replace most of those plants in the spring anyway.
We thought harder about the pipes, since it drops below freezing so rarely here that freezing pipes is something I’d never even considered. We walked around the house to inspect the portions that protruded from the house — three spigots plus the main water line to the house. All were insulted with foam wrap during construction, and looked like they wouldn’t really benefit from any additional insulation on our part, so we left them alone. We also thought about cracking the entrance to the attic to let some heat up there, but again, we decided that while the attic would get really cold, it was unlikely to drop below freezing for any extended period of time and we’d rather not have our heater running all night trying to heat the uninsulated attic space.
When Jose was a kid growing up in Corpus Christi, freezing temperatures were exciting to them. He and his brother thought it was amazing that the dog’s water dish would have ICE in it the next morning, and sometimes they even left bowls of water outside overnight on purpose, just to see the resulting block of ice. So last night we did one other fun thing before heading to bed — I put a plastic bowl out on the patio with about a cup of water inside.
Sure enough, this morning it was frozen solid. And even thought I’m 31 years old, I still found that kinda cool. 🙂
Karen says
I’d say that it is the high ceilings that are the culprit. Also having watched way too much HGTV the constantly tripping circuit breakers would worry me!