Duck Dodgers & The Furnace of Woe

Meet Duck Dodgers of the 21st Century.

He's a cat.

Moments ago Dave took this photo of him, dangling his paws over the side of the couch. 

I don't know WHAT he was doing. 

Never seen him do it before.

Just chilling, I guess.

***

OK.

So we have two houses.

One we live in. 

One that's been for sale since Christ was on the cross.

(Only $99,999! It slices, dices and juliennes fries! Act now and we'll include dog crap on the front lawn! Only 25 years worth of easy mortgage payments! You won't find this offer in stores!)

Yesterday we went to check in on the house that's for sale. We only planned a quick check and then some visiting with Dave's family but when we walked in and the temperature read 27 degrees F, we knew were going to be there for a while.

The furnace had stopped working.

Two pipes in the basement had broken.

The toilet bowl was frozen solid and there was a popsicle growing out of the bathroom faucet that reminded me of the snot-sickles that grow out of my children's noses sometimes.

"Golly gee whiz," said Dave. "This is not a good thing."

(He didn't really say that. I can't tell you what he really said because my kids read this sometimes. Hopefully they won't notice the snot-sickle part.)

We phoned the service guy and spent most of the afternoon and evening waiting for him. Turns out the transformer was busted. Bet you didn't realize that transformer-busting is as contagious as the swine flu. Yup. A couple of weeks ago Leah and Vic's furnace lost its transformer. Next thing you know, ours goes. Should have got the gol-darned vaccination, I guess.

So, there we are, in an empty house that's as cold as my ex-mother-in-law.

The wind was just shrieking outside and the temp was like minus something or other but it FELT like the High Arctic.

We built a fire in the woodstove and sat on the floor next to it.

We didn't even have chairs.

And, remember, the toilet was frozen and the water was turned off.

And, did you know that cold makes you want to pee?

Oh yes! It's true!

And there was nowhere to go pee except outside where the blizzard was blowing like the hounds of hell. And the moment you dropped your drawers your bladder curled up like a week-old rose and screamed like a boy who screams like a girl, and the skin on your arse froze as solid as that rump roast you bought on sale back in 1992 and buried at the back of your freezer underneath one hoar-frosted pork chop you wouldn't even feed to your dog.

Oh, and there's Rick The Neighbour, driving by, waving at you with his gloved hand, as you struggle to pull up the blue jeans that are now frozen in the pee that turned to ice as soon as it hit the snowbank.

Luckily my arse is as white as the snowbank so it blended in. Like snowshoe hares turn white in the winter, so too do arses. 

It's an age-old survival of the fittest technique that the Survivorman dude probably uses every week on his TV show and you don't even realize it because his white arse blends in so nicely.