Introduction:
Hello, and welcome to Don’t Remember Me Like This and part two of our special seasonal episode bound by a common theme of winter—the season and the unique perspectives it inspires. Part two is a series of stories about:
The unfortunate specter of a frozen toilet
Thoughts on a recent break in, our second in only six months
How to make decorative ice lanterns
Keen listeners of the podcast might notice I’m reading the story about the frozen toilet a second time. That is not a mistake. I mean, at first it was a mistake. I accidentally included that vignette in the first version of part one last Sunday. And then, when I realized my error, I hastily uploaded the corrected version but not before many of you listened to the full episode. And here I’m adding it where it belongs, here in part two.
So, while everything is nice and tidy in the halls of Valhalla, some of you might be wondering why you have to listen to the story about a frozen toilet a second time. And for that I can say, I’m sorry. If you like, you can file your complaints with Jaclyn. Maybe just fast forward past the episode like you would if this podcast had ads. Oh hey, isn’t it a great thing this podcast doesn’t have ads? I’m so glad you agree.
Moving on, and speaking of everything being in its right place, the seventh and last winter vignette titled “What Comes Next?!” is tucked away over there on my Patreon page which you can find and listen to by searching Patreon for “Nathaniel Barber” and becoming a member of the Don’t Remember Me Like This podcast
In the meantime, pour yourself a glass of your favorite chablis, and put your feet up—you deserve it. Enjoy part two of Winter Vignettes: Seven Scenes From Minnesota’s Most Elegant Season.
Decorative Ice Lanterns
I start with five gallon buckets, about three of them.
When it’s cold enough, I fill the buckets with water, which means filling them in the tub upstairs, two at a time. It’s the only faucet that won’t take 20 minutes to fill a five gallon bucket. But filling the buckets in the upstairs tub also means waddling downstairs with about nine gallons of water. For context, nine-ish gallons of water weighs about 80 pounds. Split between two buckets, that's about 40 lbs to each side, 40 and change with the buckets.
In a household with two young and energetic cats, carry these sloshing buckets downstairs without spilling.
The next part is the easy part. Just leave the buckets outside and let the deep winter work its magic. Probably by the next day, the buckets will be frozen. But they won’t be frozen solid. The ice forms on the top and on the sides, from the top-down and sides-in. Depending on your timing, there will still be a liquid center (more on that later).
Bring the buckets inside again.
The stressful thing about this step is how water expands when it freezes. One gallon of water expands approximately 9% in volume when it freezes. For a bucket filled with 4.5 gallons of water, the bottom and the edges of the bucket bulge under the pressure of trapped and expanding ice until the bucket is stretched taut as a cocked gun.
With the buckets inside, the ambient air does its job. As the sides of the bucket warm, they’ll eventually release their attachment to the ice block inside. The moment the bucket breaks loose from the ice sounds like a pressure grenade going off in the mudroom. Thawing two or three buckets at a time is like a wintry Independence Day.
“Can you pass the sal—” BOOM!
“Did you call about that—” CRACK!
After you’ve recovered from your heart attack, take the buckets back outside.
Inside the frozen block is a sloshing reservoir of super cold water that, if spilled on the ground, immediately turns to ice. So I suggest doing this next part far away from stairs, or a walking path.
I turn one bucket over the other, and let the ice block shlop out. I take this and set it upside-down.
What's revealed is an inverse bucket of water—an ice block that has a solid base, and a thin roof that, with a small punch, reveals the chamber of water to pour out into an empty bucket I keep nearby. I repeat this process with the second bucket and set them aside. And then I repeat this process over a Minnesota winter about two or three more times, producing about 8-12 ice buckets in total.
I have yet to find a light source that really brings this project home. Currently, I’ve been using a series of small solar powered LED lamps. They’re supposed to charge during the day, and glow at night. But currently, even at high noon, the sun is hitting the upper midwest at a severe 23 degrees—long light that is fabulous for capturing moody photographs with shadows that stretch on and on, but not great for charging solar panels that are trained directly upward. Further complicating the lamps functionality are our Christmas lights, which the lamps recognize as dusk, prohibiting the LED lamps from actuating in their full, night time splendor.
Our neighbor down the street has the right idea. They went full simple with a series of tall candles. Like candles you light with a lighter. Theirs are beautiful and natural and even offer a whiff of burny wicks as one passes by on an evening stroll.
But every now and then, the solar-powered lamps turn a corner and somehow burn like they're dying. The other day I was taking out the trash and discovered our whole driveway was glowing loud—from the lanterns a splay of crackling fractals of ice and shards of light cut this way and that in a shattered pattern across the blanketed snow.
My neighbors must think I’m simple. How many of them have driven by our house, and found me standing open-mouthed and dumbly struck by the dazzling and incredible lights in my driveway.
The Frozen Toilet
The toilet on our main floor is currently out of order. The service line is frozen—which is not surprising since the same toilet froze up during our first winter here in 2020, and our second in 2021. We knew 2022’s winter would make three year’s a frozen shitter.
It's not as though we haven’t tried to solve the issue. It’s that the issue appears unsolvable.
Last year, after the toilet mysteriously froze a second time and because of my limited expertise in plumbing, we invited three unrelated specialists to problem-solve this domestic conundrum: one plumber, a representative from a trusted insulation company we’ve worked with before, and a general contractor. They each came by to examine the northwest corner of our house, which can be observed from four separate locations:
From the front porch
From the bathroom on the main floor
From the basement below the bathroom on the main floor
From the wasp-infested, mouseturdy crawlspace under the front porch
Each of these professionals examined the structure and features of the bathroom and surrounding environment including the pipes, carpentry, insulation, air flow (in/around/through), and so on. They each came back really puzzled. None of them had a straight solution to the issue.
I offered a solution I’d been considering, which was to inject the walls and floor of the bathroom with insulation. But all three of them offered a compelling argument for why my solution was terrible: spray-in insulation would cut off air flow to the pipes, the only thing working to keep them thawed. Paradoxically, adding insulation would not only make the pipes more susceptible to freezing, but if one of the pipes were to burst, you’d have to go digging through a solid mass of insulation to get at the problem.
But, more to the point, each technician pointed out how the real costs versus the hypothetical benefits to solving this problem was well past the point of diminishing returns.
Unless, they noted, money wasn’t an issue. If you’ve got money, you can solve world hunger.
Even though their assessment was grim, it was heartening to get the same soft pass from people who stood to gain a great deal from scoring a money-pit contract.
And so, for now, while the pipes continue to hold (knock on wood) the case of the frozen toilet will remain unsolved, and possibly unsolvable. Perhaps, one day, a meteor will fall on the northwest corner of the house. Maybe then we can regroup and take another look down there. But until then, sometimes the toilet will freeze up, and other times not, and that is that.
As a stop-gap measure we’re using a small space heater in the closet-sized john. We’ve opened the cupboards under the sink and turned the heater on high to give those pipes what-for. At least in the meantime, they’re flowing again.
It is worth noting, the preheated toilet seat is a real silver lining here.
Thoughts on a Recent Break-In
At 6:21 in the morning, Jaclyn’s phone was blowing up.
I spooned up against her and her glowing screen and joked, “Who are you sexting this early in the morning?!”
Jaclyn held up her phone for me to see a real-time video of two masked men breaking into our garage out back.
“There’s someone!” she started. “Gah! There’s someone out, there’s two people out in our garage right now!”
This is not the first time our garage has been broken into.
Early last August we were going about our daily morning routine—opening the windows while it was still cool, putting water on boil for coffee, and checking in with the massively depressing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Jaclyn went to take out the trash, but she stopped at the back door, holding the door open with one hand, the trash bag still in her other hand.
“The garage door!” she said. “It’s kicked open. It’s all busted.”
I was cutting apples for breakfast and froze with the knife poised for another chop. I had no air—I thought, the bikes!
I’ve had three bikes stolen in my life, and every single one of them haunts me still.
The trip outside to the garage took about three years.
I threw open the garage door, I was already mourning the loss of our bikes—which were not just bikes but, each one of them a custom built labor of love and, really, family. I gagged to imagine they’d all been cleaned out overnight, while we slept not far away.
They were probably already parted out and chopped up for the black market.
Outside it was just as Jaclyn had described, the side door to the garage was all mangled and splintered, hanging open. The lower panel had been kicked in. I pushed the door aside and turned on the garage light.
It was a miracle! All the bikes were there! I stood there for far too long, counting the bikes again and again. Sure enough, they were all there. It didn’t make any sense.
On closer inspection it was evident there had been a struggle.
It seemed they’d ignored all the other bikes and gone after one in particular. Still, this one bike was hanging there, hanging by a network of cables and locks I’d added in preparation for such a break in. The amount of infrastructure I’d put into securing the bikes seemed, at the time, dumb and overkill. But here, all the bikes were present and accounted for. Astonishingly, the theft-prevention measures I’d taken had apparently paid off.
On the floor of the garage were my long-handled gardening loppers. The cutting teeth were bent and mangled. Corresponding chomp marks on the many locks and cables I’d laced through the bike frames indicated that whoever broke into the garage found them hanging there and resourcefully used them to cut through the cables. Hilariously, next to the garage door were my cable nippers. They were only good for a clean bite through a tiny brake or derailleur cable. They’d been used to unsuccessfully gnaw through the locks and cables.
I looked and looked and to the best I could tell I couldn’t find anything they’d stolen. There were several highly valuable items that were unlocked and free for the taking, bike wheels, two unassembled bike frames, and a plenitude of tools. But everything was still there. They only went after the big ticket items, fighting like hell to yank something loose, but eventually just gave up.
But the way they gave up was, interesting.
I’m not much of a detective, but something about the evidence illustrated some of the goings-on from the night before.
I noticed, for example, something peculiar about the garage door. Both the door and the door jamb had been mangled extensively by a crow bar or some other capable implement. The implement had been used to pry away at three separate spots of the door: above the deadbolt, the deadbolt itself, and just below the deadbolt and the doorknob. The amount of trauma inflicted at each location was shocking—huge, gouging teeth marks that bit deep drags into the hard, brittle old pine.
Funny, previously I’d assumed the door was puny and flimsy. It was a hold-over from the previous owners whose aptitude for carpentry was ad hoc and shoddy, at best. But here, the seemingly flimsy service door had put up one hell of a battle. Go figure.
Eventually however, whoever was wielding the crowbar had been able to pry loose both the doorknob and the deadbolt in what seems to have been a final frenzy. The wood was not only splintered, but twisted and pulled and pulled until finally, stripped away and beaten into submission, the door swung wide.
But that was not the only damage the door sustained. It had been a three-paneled door, but the lower panel was missing and judging by the sizable boot print on the paint, I assumed they just kicked in the panel and slid into the garage and undid the lock to open the door. But that was before I noticed how long they’d been working away at the lock and jamb, inflicting trauma that had mangled the lock to the point that it would no longer turn the slug.
Also, the demolition to the door jamb had created no small amount of wood splinters. It looked like the work of a giant, rabid beaver on amphetamines. The wood chips had landed all over the garage floor. But the kicked-in panel was resting on top of the wood chips. This indicated that the panel had been kicked in after the door had been broken loose.
But why?
And then I saw the top tube of the bike they were after. There were two huge dents on the underside of the top tube. I assume the garden loppers would have been the most likely bludgeon. Perhaps they gnawed away at the cables for too long, then gave up. And in a fit of hysterical incapability, attacked the bicycle with the loppers and, after giving up without so much as a nut or a bolt to show for their efforts, shut the door and kicked in the lower panel out of sheer frustration.
My first priority was to fix the door and secure the garage. First, I tried calling contractors or commercial door replacing companies. But not only was everyone booked out 3-4 months, but there were no doors to be had, anywhere. It didn’t help that the door I needed, needed to be an outward swinging door. Most exterior doors swing inside. But one of the several design flaws of our garage was the track on which the front sliding door opened. The track for the sliding door ran so low so that, if the side door swung inward, it’d immediately hit the track.
The main problem with an outward swing door was that the hinges would also be on the outside. And this detail was one of the only punchlines to our mid-September break-in. Here, this team of burglars spent all this time and elbow grease gnawing away at the knob and deadbolt when all they needed to do was gently tap out the pins in each of the exposed hinges, and they could have eased the door from its mount, saving me the months-long hassle of securing a suitable repair.
Repairing the garage door was an odyssey. Eventually, I broke down and ordered a custom door, a heavy-ass, out-swing door and jamb from Menards. In the meantime, I needed to go in and out of the garage, and did so by unscrewing five long screws I’d run though the door, into the jamb.
In out. In out, like that for almost two months. Every time I needed to get into the garage, I needed to bring the drill, and unscrew five long screws. And when I was done with my business in the garage, I’d use the drill to fasten the door in the five separate places.
Finally, the door arrived. As I was installing it, I realized the jamb was not only woefully askew, but was leaning forward significantly. Installing the door took some shimming and no small amount of bullshit. But eventually, I got the door in. It was very secure indeed. And I finally got a security camera as well, and trained it on the garage door.
A lot of good that did.
Here we are, only two months later, and I’d let down my guard to the point I went to bed with my phone face down and the sound off. No joke, these two guys were yamming away at our door for almost a full five minutes until, after repeated notifications from our little security camera, Jaclyn woke up and checked her phone.
Again, the bikes.
I flew downstairs and jumped into my crocs, throwing open the back door yelling at the garage.
Two figures lumbered out of our garage. I was surprised with how slowly they moved. They paid me little if any attention, though I was shouting at them and chasing them. They waddled out of the garage and made their way up to their bikes in the alleyway behind our house. They got on their bikes, and rode away, comically sliding this way and that in the deep snow, pulling huge trailers behind them.
The whole time I was chasing them I couldn’t talk right. The reason, I realized, I still had in my nightguard.
This time, they managed to nip through two of the cables I’d bought to secure the bikes. They managed to steal a floor pump and a tarp.
Again, the bikes were in a bad way. They’d been thrashed about. Whoever was trying to steal them was trying to steal them by pulling them loose with sheer force.
“If I can’t have them, then I’ll destroy them so nobody can use them.”
I returned my poor bikes to their cradles. As a makeshift security measure I locked two bikes to a lawn mower, two other bikes to appliance dollies. Another I locked with a thick chain to a toolbox that weighs a ton. With determination and an industrial set of cable nippers, the bikes can still be stolen provided there’s enough time or you don’t mind towing junkyard behind you.
Exactly what is going on back there is hard to tell. Both break-ins occurred early in the morning, at around five or six in the morning. I can’t help but wonder if this team, or two separate teams, are working still awake from the night before? Or do they just wake up crazy early to strike at the least suspecting time? Not to mention, it takes no small amount of desperation and craziness to scout out and break into someone’s garage.
I posted about the break-in on Nextdoor. I thought it would be useful to tell my neighbors about the incident, especially since I managed to snag two great shots of both people, and video of the incident from the security camera.
Someone responded, “I'm sorry this happened to you. It's so unfair” which, while I appreciate the sentiment, seemed odd. Unfair? I don’t know about that. Unfortunate and crappy, sure. But unfair? What is fair?
Someone else responded, “I've heard of catalytic converter thieves firing some rounds at people who try to intervene. I hope you keep that in mind if you decide to confront these types of people.” To which someone responded, “Return fire.” Which was responded in turn with, “Fair enough but many of these st paul types don't believe in guns, they go armed with a flashlight and broom at best, so a warning is in order so people are aware of the dangers they might face.”
And though I didn’t comment further (nowhere is restraint more rewarding than on Nextdoor), I wanted to add to the flashlight and broom, a nightguard.
Two folks discuss the films of the Coen Brothers and Ingmar Bergman while breaking into our garage out back. If the people in this video feel I've misrepresented anything they said during the course of this video, I invite them to come by and we can discuss how to correct this situation.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this special winter edition of Don’t Remember Me Like This. Remember if you want to listen to the seventh of these winter vignettes, mosey on over to my Patreon page where you can become a member and listen to super exclusive episodes nobody else can get their grubby little hands on.
Please, do this podcast a favor and let your friends know about the work we’re doing over here. If you like it, they might like it too. And until then please, don’t remember me like this.