UPDATED: I think (for now) the issue is fixed - see here for an excerpt with the previously vexing sentence. Thanks so much to all of you for your fantastic input and ideas!

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Don’t ask me how I’ve survived this long and even published here and there (and, as a student, typically aced all standardized tests concerning the English language) without a basic command of certain principles of grammar. Anyway, I’m totally stuck here, on a matter concerning use of the “past perfect” (or pluperfect or what the fuck ever) tense. This is particularly annoying considering that most of my writing concerns things that happened a long time ago, so there are, by necessity, many deviations from a “present progressive” mode of narrative (speaking in the “now,” even though I am referring to events of the past, e.g., “The year is 1986 and I am about to commit my first act of identity fraud”), into “past perfect” (bouncing from that “now” of 1986 into some previous period, e.g. 1984, “When we’d first moved to Kauai…”)

Here’s where I get impossibly hung up, and end up spending hours upon hours trying to straighten out my numerous deviations from the initially selected tense(s).

What I’m working on now, concerning events of the mid- to late seventies and narrated in the “present progressive” tense, requires a few backtracks to previous periods, such as this one:

That trailer got so cold that one morning, I’d seen ice in the toilet; all the pipes burst, and Suzi cried.

The problem is once I go into this past-perfect mode, I alternately gum things up with apparently excessive “hads,” or else I deviate from past perfect altogether. This is kind of like driving through highly variable terrain in a stick shift car, downshifting when I’m supposed to upshift and vice-versa all willy-nilly, risking the destruction of my transmission.

So tell me, Grammar Know-It-Alls:

In the above, should I really be writing “That trailer got so cold that one morning, I’d seen ice in the toilet; all the pipes burst, and Suzi had cried” ? In which case, should any and all subsequent sentences referring to the trailer we’d lived in continue with we’d, had, etc., until I return to present-progressive tense narration of the mid-to late-seventies events following the trailer anecdote?

I mean, on the one hand, that seems correct (“Suzi had cried”), but on the other, it begins to seem awfully clumsy.

Thoughts?

(Oh and, yes I know, I am totally breaking the NaNoWriMo rule of not editing as I go. Sorry, but I can’t help myself. It kills me when I end up thousands of words into a story only to realize all the tenses are FUBAR.)