A powerful winter storm claims at least 11 lives across the US

[Tree-Hugger]

6. My heat is out

I woke up at 1:00 am to discover our heater was blowing cold air. I live in an apartment and our entire HVAC was replaced this Summer. Our apartment is a shithole, though. Our maintenance guy came out overnight and said it was the water pump and line and managed some temporary fix and it worked for a while overnight, but is down again and we're at 60°. I have two kids and two cats. Most of our presents are not wrapped. I usually wrap on Christmas Eve (awful habit). We're an end unit, so 3/4 of our walls are outer walls. We're waiting on the emergency maintenance guy again. I have no clue what to do. Last night, he was on the phone with another maintenance guy and they were talking about space heaters. I get nervous with those and also don't know if they can work enough. Thankfully, we are in Southeastern PA, so we didn't get much snow and we're only at 6° with a -11° WC instead of the extreme extreme temps and snow elsewhere in the country.

I don't know how Texans dealt with this for weeks last year.