It costs money because it saves money

For someone who lives in a place that is highly affected by the weather, I tend to be largely oblivious to it before it happens. Every morning I say, "Alexa, what's the weather today?" so I know what I can or should wear to work, but I'm always surprised by the answer.

I mean, not surprised as in "shocked." She doesn't tell me the day's high and low temperatures only to have me go bug-eyed and say, "WHAAAT???" But I don't pay enough attention to the forecast that I'll have a general sense of what she's going to say before she says it. I'm more reactive than proactive.

"Oh, it's snowing in the mountains? Sweet, I'll go ski tomorrow!"

Saturday I was having a lazy day, just kind of dicking around doing laundry and watching sports. I looked out the window at one point in the afternoon only to realize that there were 3 inches of snow on the ground and it was supposed to continue through the night.

"Huh," I though. "I guess I'll go shovel the sidewalk."

That's when I realized how cold it was. A good day to shovel and then go back inside to chill out.

It stayed really cold.  And then this morning when I got up to go to work, I went to brush my teeth and when I turned on the water nothing came out.

"Hmm," I thought.

I checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten to pay my bill. Nope - no problem there.

I went down into the cellar to see if there was flooding or anything overt. Nothing looked unusual.

So I called a plumber.

"Do you think my pipes are frozen?" I asked.

"Could be. Why don't we come out and take a look."

"I need to go to work. Could you do an afternoon appointment? Is it ok to leave? The house isn't going to blow up, is it?"

I have no idea why I asked that. I'm really not a ditz when it comes to home repairs.

"You should be fine. Leave one of the faucets on - maybe they will thaw out if it gets sunny later."

So I left a faucet on, and figured that if I needed to, I could stay in a hotel if I didn't have water for a couple of days.

I was talking to my mom about it as I drove to work.

"Ugh, the house is so old, I figured something like this would happen eventually. It'll probably cost me thousands of dollars."

"Well, I hope it's not that much," she said.

"Remember Moonstruck? Plumbing costs $10,000." 

Everything I know about plumbing I learned from Moonstruck.

"But do you have copper pipes?" she asked.

"In fact, I do. I checked!"

I got to work and went about my day. I spent many hours in meetings where people yelled, sometimes at me. I went to truancy court. I tried not to think about getting home to burst pipes and water everywhere.

Some people at work said that a lot of times when pipes freeze, it's no big deal. You just have to wait for them to thaw. I actually felt very zen about it.

But then I got home and turned on the faucet. And water came out!! And the faucet that I had left on upstairs was running. Huzzah! It was a huge relief.

And I'm convinced it worked out because I had copper pipes, just like Cosmo said I should.