The last few weeks have felt like major downers. I was determined that this week, no matter what, I would find something lighthearted to write about.

I mean, things were sort of looking up, right? The temperature was finally out of the single digits. With the passing of Feb. 14, the official holiday season was over, and we’d survived another year of not knowing what to do with ourselves.

After two weeks of ups and downs with the furnace, we finally seemed to have it in good running order.

So, I had a lot to be optimistic about, right?

I think you all know what the Universe had in store for me. Yep. It was time for me to get an unplanned indoor swimming pool.

The pipes that I’d so carefully thawed out and then spent days checking to make sure things were circulating and keeping them warm and open, well, I guess the freeze got to them, and combined with the running hard for days on end, one of them gave up.

Now there are a lot of things that I can be grateful for, and I’ve really tried hard to focus on them, but I’m going to take a moment and say, I’ve had it. I’m done with stupid houses and stupid things that break and I’m just really over all of it.

So, now that that’s out of my system, I can be grateful that I was working from home that day so the water didn’t end up running for hours and hours. It happened in the middle of the day, and was contained to the first floor and the basement, so I was able to open the door and sweep and squeegee most of the water right out the door.

Thanks to all my recent furnace adventures, I knew it was a heating pipe, and I knew how to shut the system off, so after immediately turning the main off to stop the flood, once I’d calmed down and located the source of the flood, I was able to isolate that area and turn the rest of the house back on.

Quite possibly the most amazing thing is the wall that the pipe broke in? On one side, there was a recently installed hardwood floor. On the other side was a tile floor with throw rugs on it. The break was toward the side with the tile floor and the water was shooting out with enough force that it went straight through that wall and onto the tile floor, while the hardwood floor remained unscathed.

By the time the plumber showed up at my house for the fourth emergency call in three weeks, I had most of the downstairs cleaned up and the throw rugs in the washing machine. It was almost a bonus that it was hot water that was spraying everywhere and that some of the larger rugs essentially got a steam clean!

After I dragged them out and threw them over the banister to freeze dry, I scraped the ice off the next day, and I don’t think they’ve ever been cleaner! Look at me, finding the positive in a huge negative.

I have to, because after this latest calamity, I really feel like I might be losing my mind. Part of me feels like there really can’t be that much more to fix or replace, while the other part of me is warily eying up every pipe, every appliance, ever door, window, what have you, just wondering when it’s going to fail.

I would really love to get ahead of the game and proactively fix things or replace them before they fail, but the emergency fund has been hit hard this year between the Great Well Debacle and this latest round of heating issues. There isn’t really much that I can do except do my best to mitigate the damage and get the train back on track as soon as I can.

I’ve also been lucky to have responsive professionals who are terrific at their jobs and are still answering my phone calls. I don’t take that for granted for a moment. So, cross your fingers that maybe this was my last disaster, at least for a little while, and maybe next week we can get back to some lighter-hearted fare!

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News