Everyone always talks about the weather, but never seems to do anything about it.

First off, that title is a quote from Carl Sandburg. I don't know why I thought of it since I'm not the type to spout out random quotes from literary giants, but it came to mind - so why not let the opportunity go to waste.

This is now uncharted territory. Two posts on a blog - and in one day no less. So I thought I share what's happened regarding the weather here in MN. While most Minnesotans pride ourselves in being hearty and dealing with harsh winters, this past weekend was a doozy. It never got above 0 degrees, and the overnight lows got into the upper negative teens. Add another negative 20 degrees or so for wind chill, and it's pretty darn cold.

Now, normally I wouldn't make these types of posts about the weather (so now you don't have worry about boredom on future posts), but today we learned about a new problem in our house that the winter has caused. It started Saturday morning when we went to empty the dishwasher which we had run overnight. When we opened it up, the bottom was filled with water. I thought the drain might be clogged, so I did some disassembling without finding any culprits. I suspected it might be the pump, but didn't want to tackle that problem. Well, today I was asked to pick up Karsten from Kindergarten and Kiera from pre-school so that Nikki could try to get to work by 4pm. I got home to a crying infant (Avalyn) and an 19-month-old (Teagan) who had just awakened from a nap and had a leaky diaper that went through her whole outfit. Oh, and Nikki was coming upstairs to say there was water on the floor in the laundry room. I didn't even get to kiss Nikki she went out the door so fast.

So I called our plumber (a friend from church, Jim Morrison - give him a call) since it seemed to be a sewer line back-up. They recommended a different friend that did that kind of work, who came over a couple hours later. After an hour of trying to snake the line, he couldn't get it unclogged. The nice technician (Paul Olsen, from a one-guy company named Alpha Plumbing) said he thought the line was frozen or collapsed. We're hoping it's the former.

Paul recommended that we call Viking Sewer and Drain since they had cameras they could run through the line, and also have a steam system to melt any frozen areas. I called them at 9pm and got a busy call center, followed by a return call from a technician within 5 mins. They are coming tomorrow afternoon (since they can't get any more hot water tonight - scary thought) at a fee of at least $350. Crap. I hope our tax refund is bigger than expected. More updates later.

Update: $435 later and 3 companies later, we now have an unclogged sewer line. The guy that got it unblocked said there was 15 feet of frozen "stuff" in there. Maybe that $435 wasn't such a bad deal after all... Now we can start saving to fix the dishwasher (or get a new one if that may be cheaper.)