Let me set the stage.

I have worked pretty much nonstop for the last three weeks, with the exception of (1) going to M. Giant and Trash's for The Amazing Race; (2) going to Mr. and Mr. Tall-and-Beautiful's for a holiday party; and (3) that stupid inside-out story with the sushi. On Wednesday, which was my "day off" from my day job, I got up and worked, starting at about 6:30 in the morning and going until 10:30 or so at night. Meanwhile, the dishes and takeout containers pile up, the laundry gets done on the fly and only as needed, I lament the accumulation of clutter, I dream of the day I will have enough time to sort the gargantuan pile of mail/papers/junk inside the front door, and I knock myself out every night with the closest thing I have in the house to a sleeping pill -- old familiar episodes of Friends on DVD, watched on the little TV in the bedroom. And in the morning? Get up and do it all over again.

Meanwhile, it has been a reasonable winter so far -- lots of frosty mornings, but none that will really knock you on your ass. This changed about a week ago, when the temperature started to offer its wicked, throaty cackle of spite. You wake up one morning, and all of a sudden, it's two degrees. And that's just not fun at all, even though it's nowhere near as bad as it gets. I hadn't even unearthed my winter coat yet, even though I knew it was somewhere in my closet. I was limping through with my TWoP fleece (shut up; it's cool) and hoping that I would -- I'm not kidding -- find the time to look for my coat. Meanwhile, I couldn't find any gloves, and was very lucky to get a lovely, sherbet-green pair of mittens as a gift.

But when the temperature dropped, I noticed that my apartment was . . . oddly cold. Not see-your-own-breath cold, but too cold. And when I put my hand on the heat registers along the bottom of the walls, they were ice-cold. The heat, she was not on. And surprisingly enough, it hadn't been that bad when it was 20 or so, probably because of all the heat I was getting from the hallway and the apartments all around me. When it hit zero, though? Forget it.

So of course, I wanted to call maintenance. But . . . of course, I didn't want to do it with all the clutter around the apartment. Because who wants to invite somebody into your apartment when it doesn't look its best?

Meanwhile, the very last recap of the very, very bad Survivor season was due today -- Friday -- and was mostly done, but probably needed a bit more work. I was scheduled to go to my parents' house sometime in the afternoon to start the Christmas celebrating. And, of course, because of the time problems, would you like to know whether I had bought either one of them their Christmas gifts yet? I had not.

So this was the schedule for today: wake up around 7:00, pick up the apartment for a while (which I needed to do anyway, and not just because of the heat), call maintenance, work on the recap, head out to do some shopping, and then go to Mom and Dad's. Not a great plan, but a plan I reviewed at the beginning of the day and decided I could tolerate.

The first wrinkle came when the temperature today dropped to about ten below. So that's even colder. Today, I was padding around the apartment in my pajamas, a sweatshirt, a fleece robe, socks, and my giant comical Happy Feet slippers. It was cold. Would you like to know how much fun it is to clean an apartment that's so cold you just want to hide under a blanket? Not very much fun. But I did it. I picked up, I puttered around, I cleaned the kitchen (mostly), and I got to a point where I was ready to call maintenance, which I did around 10:00 in the morning. I was patched through to a manager of a different apartment complex (apparently, the manager of mine had the day off), and she said that "ironically," she was already coming over to the complex to deal with a resident of one of our other buildings who was also having what she referred to as (I swear to God) "heating challenges."

So that's what I was having. "Heating challenges."

Anyway, she told me that she would be heading over with a maintenance guy around noon, and to sit tight. I actually managed to relax a little before they got there, polishing off the last part of the action on the recap and ready for the final edit. Around 12:30, the manager showed up, hauling a guy with her who was wearing a jaunty winter hat. He came in, he went over to the corner of the apartment, and he peered at the knob that you use to (supposedly) turn the heat up and down. "What does that tell you?" the manager asked him. "It tells me it's cold," he said. HILARIOUS.

He started to shine his flashlight on the heat registers that run along most of the walls of my apartment. Of course, most of those registers have furniture in front of them, given that they are, you know, located along the walls of a relatively small one-bedroom apartment that is lived in by a person who owns entirely too much stuff anyway. He started to talk about having to have access to the registers, and made me move my TV cart, full of TV, TiVo, blah blah blah. I got it moved so that he could get back in the corner, but he basically gave me the brilliant, "Yeah. Huh. Don't know."

He looked in the bedroom: "Huh." He looked in the bathroom: "Huh." Eventually, they broke the news that he didn't know how to fix it since he couldn't find a "bleeder." Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, the manager told me that she would be calling the Important Heating Guy, and he would know what to do.

She called me about fifteen minutes later to tell me that IHG would indeed be coming by in about two hours. I was very relieved, because I was anxious to get moving so that I could do the shopping and still make it to Mom and Dad's at a reasonable hour, and figured he could be let in with a key from the office, so I wouldn't have to wait around. But she had something she had to tell me. "Oh, he says to tell you that he has to have a two-foot clearance in front of all the registers in the apartment."

Picture a small apartment full of furniture. Picture moving everything two feet away from the walls. The bookcases. The video cabinet. The bed. The nightstand. The entire elaborate arrangement of computer, printers, desk chair -- all of which nestle perfectly into a little alcove. Picture being confronted with this task in a chilled, cluttered apartment on the day before Christmas, with shopping you're still supposed to do.

It was when I was on the phone with her that I first found myself in tears. "I don't understand what you expect me to do," I said. "There isn't even enough room in my apartment to have everything two feet away from the walls. It isn't possible." "Yeah," she said. "I sympathize with what you're saying, I'm just telling you that he won't necessarily fix it unless he can have two feet in front of all the registers."

The first thing I thought of when I got off the phone with her was that there was no way I would get the shopping done. That was the one thing that would have to go, which meant I wouldn't have anything to give my mom and dad on Christmas. I picked up the phone and called my mom, planning to apologize profusely in advance for the fact that (1) I won't have presents for them; and (2) I will probably be late getting there, because I'm going to spend the next two hours trying to see how much furniture I can move away from my walls.

I started to cry as soon as I heard my mom's voice on the phone. The cold, the exhaustion, the stress, the overwork, the holiday, the irritation, the embarrassment, the disappointment . . . something uncorked and it all went at once. I could barely talk to her, even, but I tried to tell her what was happening, and that I wouldn't be there. "Well, we'll come over and help you move stuff," she said. "No," I said -- well, sobbed, sort of. "No, no, no, no, I don't want that, don't do that. I'm just really sorry that I won't have anything for you -- I shouldn't have gone out last night [to the holiday party] -- I'm just really sorry . . . " And then I lost the thread, because I was crying. A lot. And it was one of those moments where I can almost observe myself crying while I was doing it and wonder what in the hell my problem is. But all I could think about coherently was the computer desk -- what would I do with it? What about the bookcase? Would I have to pack up everything I own like I'm moving?

"Well," she said, "we'll come over and help you." "No," I told her. "I don't want you to drag over here, it's so cold outside . . . ." "We'll come help move the heavy stuff, we can do that. We can help you figure out where to put everything. We'll help you." I waited a second. "I didn't call to make you come over and help me," I told her. Which was true. "I know," she said. "But we'll be over and we'll help you." I waited another second. "Okay," I said. "Okay." She said they would dress warm, and I told her to wear two pairs of socks.

By the time they got there maybe half an hour later, I had a lot of it done. The books from the bookshelf were stacked in front of the couch. The DVDs were in shoeboxes, the cabinet was pulled away from the wall, and I even had a start on the little office, which was by far the worst part. When they got there, my mom pointed to a number of containers of recycling that were against one of the walls I didn't have to clear, and she asked if it would help if they took them out to the recycling -- which would mean a trip to the dumpster, which is a good haul across the parking lot, and it was still about five below. "We'll just take these out," my mom said, because she knew that in a way, it was hard for me to let them actually move furniture.

The long and the short of it is that we got it done. I puttered in the bedroom while my mother, without being asked, did the dishes that remained in the kitchen so I wouldn't have anything else to deal with when I came back to an apartment that was already doomed to be in total disarray. I let my father do one of his favorite things on earth, which is to walk around my apartment picking up loose change off of various surfaces and putting it into a cup. ("You know," he always says as he surveys my giant stashes of change, "if you take this to the bank, they'll give you money for it.") We finally left at about 3:00 or so, planning to meet up at their house. I left a message on their machine, though, calling from my car, when I decided that I would get ambitious and try to do a little shopping before I came over. It was not to be. While I was walking the aisles at Barnes & Noble, IHG called and said he couldn't get into the apartment. It seemed that they had the wrong key. I hesitated to go back, but once he told me that everything would be fine -- unless, of course, a pipe burst and flooded the apartment -- I made my way back and met IHG at the apartment. He looked around. He whacked the crap out of the pipes with a wrench, and hot water started to flow like it's supposed to. They're pretty sure it's a bad valve, and it's safe to fix on Monday.

When I got to my parents' house, my mom offered me a beer, and we sat downstairs and watched the very depressing end of the Vikings game. She made dinner, we watched TV . . . it was a day I was so happy to be finished with. She loaned me a pair of pajamas, because in the rush to leave, I hadn't even packed anything. I finished the recap. I thanked them both endlessly for coming. My mother and I talked about Christmas, and my dad stayed downstairs to watch Joan of Arcadia, and we argued over whether Amber Tamblyn's dress was too low-cut. And tomorrow, we'll get up and . . . well, I won't have anything to give them yet, but I'm thinking whatever I eventually come up with had better be pretty good.

My parents rule. They really do.