Harbinger of Troubles

This morning, there was a dead bird in the grill of my Yukon. I discovered it when I opened the door to our garage while I was holding my coffee and my phone…and so I did what any legit adult does: I slammed the door and turn right back around to the kitchen. And then I sought out Jason, wherein I told him there was a dead bird stuck in the front of my car and it was an OMEN.

(We all know here that Jeanne considers a bird flying into a window and dying to be a harbinger of troubles. And so all I could think was about was what she would say about a bird flying into a grill and dying.)

But Jason removed the bird, rolled his eyes at my omen warning, and I started off on a snowy journey to PJP Nifong for our first day back since Saturday. (Let’s all just ignore that it was snowing…and continued to snow ALL DAY, despite the forecast that it would stop mid-morning.)

And when I got to PJP, the texts from staff who couldn’t make it in began to roll in. This should have been my first clue that troubles were on my way.

I created a relatively slim baking schedule, guessing that we wouldn’t be terribly busy on a snowy Wednesday. And so those of us there got started and it was going just fine for 15 minutes or so. And then we discovered we had no water. Like turn on the faucet and nothing comes out sort of no water.

I was genuinely flummoxed because I stopped by yesterday and the water was working fine. And also, I’ve arrived at this age with never encountering frozen pipes and I literally had no clue what to do. Is that a landlord thing? A city water thing? A plumber thing? So I did what any legit adult does: I called my mother.

(And you 100% know this sort of thing is Jeanne’s wheelhouse. She loves the intrigue of solving a mystery - bonus points for a mechanical mystery.) She called the city and then she started calling a long list of plumbers. Not surprisingly, everyone was booked up with pipe problems all over Columbia.

Unsure of what to do, we worked on putting away our food order and cleaning a bit, ultimately deciding that if no help arrived by 10, we would announce our closure for the day due to no water. And then the city water department knocked on the back door. I’ve never been so happy to see someone arrive. I’m not sure my psyche could have survived three days of being closed.

So look, the water guy could have literally told me he needed to do anything to solve the issue and I would have agreed. Between you and me, he could have lit a blow torch and held it up to the pipe and I would have decided that seemed reasonable.. As it turns out, they just put a tube into the ground and pump hot air in there. I think. I guess?

At any rate, we had water at 9:58 am and we all moved into our baking schedule - two hours behind schedule, but so, so, so very thankful for the quick fix. 0 out of 10 stars for dead bird omens. But 10 out of 10 stars for water trucks with speedy response times.