well well well

It's a hole in the ground, and I feel like I've fallen down one!

After digging and and scraping road yesterday for about 4 and a half hours, we finally managed to get the car out of our street. Came back into the house, and laid things on the radiator to dry, and discovered they were all cold.  Uh oh... boiler goosed! Handily my folks must have managed to get away so we were able to decamp to their house for the night or so. Getting there was fun, with Taede marshalling the boys with their suitcase, and a bag of toys and stuff and dragging Piper on a sled.  I followed bringing another suitcase for our stuff, and work clothes, and the casserole dish with partially cooked tea in it, and a box of provisions to get/keep us going when we got there. Also on a sledge....sledges, it would appear, don't drag too well on tarmac, who knew there was actually still tarmac under all that snow!?!

After navigating what can only be described as treacherous road conditions in my parents street, which has a nasty hill eitehr entrance, combined with a great old uphill dogleg turn, we got inside.  Heating was on ....ahhhh bliss.  So, kids in, stripped of wet clothing, Provisions put away, dinner on, rice for accompanying dinner on, upstairs, and beds (two single and one sofa bed) put to rights, sheets etc., Glasgow shower, into work clothes and wait for Taede returning with the pooch. All that in half an hour is no' bad!  He took forty minutes! Which made me late for picking up a chap from work to get him in for shift and pay! Eventually got to David and apologised profusely for freezing his ....feet off!

Got into work without much more incident.  Helped out with stocking up batteries (who said retail wasn't glamourous!) and then as the night went on, ended up taxi-ing more people home, or at least to a close approximation as main roads allowed! I got home myself and feeling like crap stepped into the shower with the intent of standing there for ages, but it doesn't drain away quickly enough! Never mind, settle Piper after she fretted and into bed.  Oh dear sweet slumber...oh how thee mock me! 

Eventually after a fairly ropey sleep, Piper woke at five-ish.  There was the roar of the mains, and I thought initially it was the heating, but then I begun to fear it was an outside tap.  On investigating it later, after no further snoozling, my worst fears were confirmed. The outside tap is completely shot from it's moorings, and water rushing everywhere!  The idea of our own home being without heat and in a similar situation fills me with equal amounts of fear and dread.  With us hosting all the immediate family of Taede at Christmas we don't need any further upheaval! Thankfully the ex managed to make a mercy dash to B&Q and after a little bit of hamfisted duck tape surgery most of the water exiting the burst pipe is now being fed into a drain.  So I can afford to wait for a plumber, and a few emergency calls here and there I can afford to pay for one too! At least until next month! :)

Thanks go to Shirley Campbell, for general all round good-eggness! David Harley, for being an understanding sweetheart, Kim Munro for being the best boss ever, Sigrid MacMillan for her excellent, and precognitive cake baking skills, Stevie Weir for winning gold medal in the B&Q dash, and Julie at Santander for being the best advisor on the phone by a country mile!