Frozen Assets

The water pipes in the upstairs bathroom are frozen.  The toilet still works and there is cold water only to the sink but the shower and the hot water to the sink are solid somewhere in the wall behind the shower.  The guy who installed it was not the sharpest knife in the drawer and put the pipes behind the insulation, against the outside concrete block wall.  I wasn't here when it was done, not that it would have made any difference, I suppose. The main bearing walls are 30+ cm thick but this wall is only half that.  Not much insulating value after a week or two of -20 weather.  Why I didn't let the taps run slowly to prevent freezing is a question I have been asking myself since.  We will have to cut the pipes and reinstall them inside the room likely where they should have been in the first place.

It is cold.  Last night it was -25.  Climbed to -10 by 1:00 today and has been dropping more than 1 degree per hour since.  It is now -19  at 7:00 pm.  Our house is cold.  It was never designed for these kind of temperatures and is under-furnaced as well.  Or perhaps under-registered.  When Tanya redid the heating system in 2005 her then husband insisted on changing the old standard cast iron registers for some local built cheap ones that do not have the heat exchange capacity needed.  We have priced new ones at Epicentre in Krivii Rih at about $100 to $150 per meter.  We need about $1000 worth.

Tanya cooked up a big pot of buckwheat porridge for the dogs tonight and put a cup of goose fat in it for added energy.  The mutts were all happy.

Kuchma Cat has been staying out all night again for the past few weeks.  I guess business is booming getting ready for spring kittens.  He rules the block on which we live.  Last fall I had to pull him off a much larger black tom that he had choked down.  The tom was pretty wobbly but managed to get away.  All the fat Kuchma put on earlier this winter is standing him in good stead this weather.

He was left in the house when Tanya went to Dnipro to get me on Friday, jumped up on the counter (he rarely does that) and ate a fair bit of ham that Tanya had left out from her lunch.  The dogs got the trimmings around the teethmarks.  Tonight he jumped up on the counter, while we were sitting in the kitchen having supper.  Tanya yelled at him and he jumped down, glared at her, then walked over, laid down at her feet and began purring.  Tanya said "Just like all men when you yell at them".