Frozen solid

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/01/2018 (3104 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I don’t want to sound like a chronic complainer, but life has been a little harder than normal lately.

It has nothing to do with the fact we have been in the icy grip of a soul-destroying cold snap for what feels like a month, a stretch so brutal that shivering woodland creatures have been looking for electric fences to fling themselves into in a desperate attempt to warm up.

The problem is that things around my house, basic things that I rely on to get me through the stress-filled days as a big-shot professional newspaper columnist, have begun to malfunction.

Take my front door, for example. No, seriously, take it; you’d do me a favour.

I’m referring to the state-of-the-art steel front door that my wife insisted we buy about five years ago because our old wooden door was not as stylish as the others in the neighbourhood.

I admit our old door was not much to look at, but it had two qualities I look for in a modern front door, namely: 1) you could open it; and 2) you could close it.

Unless you possess the size and strength of Hulk Hogan, it is almost impossible to open or close our fancy front door, apparently because, what with the roller-coaster weather, our house has shifted, which the door finds annoying, so it refuses to function in a normal manner.

To get into our house now, you have to take a running start, then fling your body into the door with the force of an NFL linebacker. It’s the same when you want to close it — basically you hammer it with your entire body while shrieking like a villain in one of those old kung fu movies.

In the morning, when we want to fetch the newspaper from the front step, we do not even attempt to open the front door. Instead, we dart out the back door, scuttle through the garage, trundle onto the front porch, snatch up the newspaper, then retrace our steps, hoping a rogue gust of wind does not blow open our ratty bathrobe and turn our medically sensitive areas into an icicle, if you catch my drift.

So, we have hired a door guy who came to our house the other day and frowned at our front door, the way TV doctors frown at the medical chart of a patient who has just been run over by a recreational vehicle.

“Hmmmm,” the door guy muttered, his frown intensifying. “I’m pretty sure I can fix it, but it’s going to cost several million dollars.”

OK, technically, he did not say several million dollars, but the point is we are going to have to spend a large chunk of change so that we can enjoy the luxury of both opening and closing our front door whenever we choose.

Which brings us to the issue of the bathtub in our main bathroom. Regular readers will recall that if I am famous for anything, I am famous for starting the day with an hour-long soak in a scalding hot tub.

Every morning, my routine is the same — fetch the newspaper (I used to do this by opening the front door, but not lately), then climb into a tub that I have filled to the point of overflowing with water hot enough to make soup.

Then, I will slowly lower myself into the bath and, because I am roughly the size of the aforementioned Hulk Hogan, rest my feet on the tiles on either side of the faucet, recline in the tub, and attempt to read the newspaper, until one or more of our dogs wanders in and demands that I lower my arm into the tub, then dangle it over the edge so they can lick the salty hot water off the dripping limb.

Unfortunately, over the past week, my beloved bathtub, the only one in our house, has developed a bad habit — it no longer drains the water we put in it. Instead, it will emit the occasional belch from the drain and the water will just sit there for a day or two, like sludge in a sewage lagoon.

“You can’t use the tub until we get it fixed!” is what my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, declared when I brought her into the main bathroom in the hope the tub would understand it was in trouble.

So my wife dragged out her various plumbing utensils, including something called “a snake,” and attempted to remove the clog, but apparently the cover on our overflow drain refuses to budge, which means now, along with a door guy, we have to call in several professional drain guys, so that I can resume my hobby of soaking in boiling water.

The situation is so extreme that our friend Lena dropped by the other night, armed with her secret weapon, a device called the One Second Plumber, which is apparently some kind of air-powered plunger that blasts a secret mixture of gases down your drain, thereby theoretically destroying the blockage. In the end, it failed to do anything other than provide us with a few minutes worth of entertainment and false hope.

For the time being, I am unable to bathe, which means I am slightly more fragrant than usual. The good news is that no one has been able to complain to my face that I smell, because I haven’t been able to open the (bad word) front door.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca