“They can’t all be winners,” or, “one of my 2014 goals is honesty and that means I’m going to post even the pointless drafts I should keep to myself.”

Those of you lucky enough to be in non-miserable temperatures or those of you with ice in your veins may well have grown tired of hearing us beleaguered summer children lament our great struggles. Just as you have no fucks left to give for hearing about the weather, I have no fucks to give for your exhaustion with the subject. We are at a fucks-to-give impasse.

But the house always wins, and since this is my blog, well, I win. (Or you can just leave. That works too, I guess.)

Yesterday morning we discovered that the heater was no longer working. It was snowing and the temperature was beginning its descent to nine below zero and so, naturally, we lost heat. Of course we did.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. A couple years ago we ran out of gas just before the season’s massive world-destroying snowmageddon. My parents checked into a hotel room, but I was content to lock myself in the tiny windowless room in the basement with my space heater and my dog, because that apocalyptic scenario sounded better than the horror of actually venturing beyond the fortress that is our home.

This year, we responded to the great frost by buying several more space heaters, turning on ovens and fire places, and boiling water. Modern family make fire. I once again retreated to the cave and had the unenviable task of keeping our outside dog from his losing his mind over all this inside business. He’s a very particular, habit-driven creature and did not appreciate being shut out of his room. (His dog door enters the storage area in the basement, which is, generally speaking, the dog’s room.) I had to let him out and stand around for about ten minutes until it was clear that he recognized that the temperature was inhospitable and then let him back in until he got antsy again and the process repeated. I gave up and went to sleep at around 2:30 (with him inside, of course).

I woke up a few hours later and went to wash the 24-hours-of-dog and weekend’s worth of not showering off me. I suspect I was being issued some sort of punishment for my gross decision to not shower all weekend and thus unable to skip this morning’s shower, in which I discovered that only the bathwater of dragons was coming into my shower. Thus, I found myself filling buckets of cold water from the sink for a bath. I have a great deal of experience with requiring buckets for bathing, but this is almost certainly the first time I needed to so because of a shortage of cold water.

The heater was fixed today but it was somewhat limited consolation because a life-ruining chill has already set in. I shouldn’t be saying that. THANK YOU, GREAT SPIRITS OF TEMPERATURE REGULATING APPLIANCES. I AM HUMBLED BY YOUR MERCY.

Unfortunately, the drunken Polar Vortex’s reign of terror over my home isn’t actually done. I went to let my fidgety dog out, only to find that his room drenched in liquid misery. By which I mean that our pipes burst. Our pipes burst and panic overtook the house as we braved the frigid downpour searching for the main stopcock. (After I asked Google how to turn the water off and Google told me I was looking for a stopcock. Then I had to ask Google what a stopcock was and where to find a stopcock and what a stopcock looks like and then saw fit to tell you this sidebar stopcock story solely so that I could use the word stopcock half a dozen times in a blog post. Word of the day!)

I had big, big plans to post MWF for the month of January, building towards more regular posting in future months. This post schedule was to include weekly Monday vlogs, but at no point in my day of smelling like dog, drawing up bathwater, or dancing in the freezing rains of our burst pipes was I in a particularly, “Let’s put my life face on the internet,” mood. That’s obviously the great tragedy in all of this: a storm hit and it got in the way of my vlogging schedule. Life is hard.

Also, I obviously lied before; the house has clearly lost.