For a brief moment I thought about it. Last weekend, I actually considered shimmying into the crawl space and turning on the valve for the outside shower.

Oh, how nice it would be to start taking those awesome backyard showers again – after a surf or even just first thing in the morning. Outside shower aficionados are very passionate about washing al fresco, and the longer we continue the practice into the fall, or the earlier we begin in the spring, the better. Ironic that someone with such poor hygiene as I should be so enamored by an act of bathing, but I’m hooked.

Of course, the reason the shower has to get turned off is the pipes are outside the insulated part of the house and are…