We’ve been trying to keep the water pipes intact for over a week.

I woke up at 1:30 AM, like I do every morning. I crawled out of my hole of a bed. It has a slow leak so it needs to be aired up every thirty minutes. After sleeping on it for four hours — well, use your imagination.

So I scooted to the edge of the platform bed, my butt fully six inches lower than the top of the mattress corral-er board, my feet about seven inches from the floor. Let’s be clear: I’m old, I don’t DO board digging into the back of my thighs, feet dangling far from the floor, then magically SPRING up past the board and into my slippers.

I hope you’re getting a clear picture of how un-smoothly things were going for me so far. Yeah, it was just a typical night, but familiarity doesn’t breed ease and comfort, just resignation.

All I had to do was go pee, wash my hands, air up the bed, get back under the covers, adjust the eight pillows I pack around my body, then fade back to dreamland. I don’t think so! After all that activity I’m usually good for at least another four hours of wakefulness.

So I went to the bathroom, peed, washed my…WTF!!!!

Despite the fact that we had every tap in the house open, the hot water she no go. We’d been keeping the taps open for a week and things had been fine. Well, for me they’d been fine. My husband had spent all day yesterday under the house, under the kitchen sink and in the utility room with his propane torch. Had to buy another propane tank; in 33 years I’d never known him to need a new propane tank. I’m sure he had. It just hadn’t happened on my watch.

My husband isn’t working Thursday and Friday this week. That means that he can take the laundry to the laundromat to dry them early this week. Well, he could have if he’d been able to keep hot water running to the washing machine. *sigh*

Now there’s no hot water anywhere, what’s next, washing clothes at the laundromat as well as drying them there? I mean I could come up with the price of a clothes dryer and solve the drying clothes at the laundromat inconvenience. But, so far, no amount of money buys a machine that washes clothes without water.

So all this BS about laundry and hot water and baths is flashing, faster than the speed of light, through my brain as I stand in front of the bathroom sink and wonder if I want to brave the bone-painful cold water to wash my hands. No, but….

Wait! We have hand sanitizer in the medicine cabinet! Yay! I grab it and glorp it around on my hands — and I’m stuck with the vile smell. Ah, I know, I’ll slap on some heavily perfumed skin cream, with cotton gloves for a backup in case the combo smell of hand sanitizer and perfumed cream knocks me unconscious.

As I stand there, in front of the bathroom sink, working my hand sanitizing plan, a new thought hits me. I stop rubbing the hand sanitizer around, as my head fills with the sound of my father cussing as he goes out into the snow filled night to thaw the water line before it freezes.

He didn’t get there in time. The pipes had burst. My parents did not have the money to pay a plumber. The next morning my mother called her parents. Granddaddy crawled around under the house with my father. Then they gave my parents the money for a plumber.

So I’m standing at the bathroom sink, wondering if our pipes had burst; water mains are freezing and bursting all over Tulsa this last week. I finally get my hands rubbed dry, air up the mattress, and crawl into bed, and wonder what good it would do to wake my husband.

Obviously, the number one unwritten law of marriage is that no wife ever has to suffer solitude while waiting for her husband to wake up to bad news. I rarely invoke that unwritten law, should I do so tonight?

If I wake him up in the middle of the night what’s he gonna do, get dressed and crawl under the house at 2:00 AM, with the temp now 7 and still dropping? Not bloody likely! But, if I don’t wake him up, is he going to say, at 6:00 AM, why didn’t you wake me? Which will tip me over into a frenzy of hysteria: “Oh, yeah, like you’d have gotten up and fixed it!”

Frenzied hysteria. Yeah. They’ll put that on my gravestone: “Vonni, beloved frenzied hysterical wife.”

So I woke him up. Dang, the man looked so unhappy. I could see the film reel running through his head. You know, the one where he spends the next X-number of days thawing and repairing the burst pipes; with me providing the background theme song of, “Oh, lord, what’s a plumber going to cost?”

He went back to bed, and I decided to just write about it all. What else can either one of us do?

I’ll tell you who I blame: Al Gore. Remember him? He’s the guy who invented the internet and then, years later, topped that invention (which was pretty darned big) by inventing global warming.

I’ll bet Tipper has been frozen in frenzied hysteria for decades. Remember her big plans for censoring everything in the world? It was just Tipper’s way of getting Al to stop spending 24/7 looking at pron. Which he did stop doing. Only now we have global warming. But I don’t blame Tipper! She’s my sister.