So I already mentioned the disappearance of my case review date with immigration, but that really counts as 2021 putting in a final boot before sneaking off into the winter night and not an indcation that 2022 is getting the bit between its teeth.
Stay tuned.
Mrs Stevie and I departed for Florida on the third Friday in January, ready to take up residence in our timeshare week starting the fourth Saturday in January per the agreement we've held freehold for lo! these many years. We've done this for many years, and now have it all down to a fine art: We load the Mrs Steviemobile with four or five boxes of essentials (paints, easels, my n-scale UK model railway gear, clothing, Harry Potter cosplay gear etc) load a cooler with sandwiches and bottled water1 and the iPad with a Terry Pratchett book-onna-tape3 and off we go.
This year the cargo included three big totes of stuff for the Stevieling, whose stuff is currently taking up one room, half a basement and a storage unit in NY. I keep hinting that maybe a storage unit in Florida would be a better idea4 but so far no action has been taken.
We break the journey just this side of the North/South Carolina border, which on a good day means we arrive at a hotel around 7pm and at the timeshare around 4pm the next day. Last year we hit bad weather and it took longer. The year before we had a winter storm so we started a day early and broke the journey in three. Bad weather is very bad in the South because they don't know how it works5.
This year we drove out of cold weather in NY into a winter storm in Virginia and North Carolina, something that was once unknown and is now getting to be a familiar exerience6. We still made decent time, but the driving was terse because Virginian drivers don't do weather well and in North Carolina they were not used to plowing so the plows and graders they were using were going slow and carving up the road. The sparks were pretty. Funny thing, I only knew it was snowing because of the noise. With the headlights dipped I couldn't see anything but the road. On full beam sleeting snow. If I hadn't heard the exact same hing two years before I wouldn't have understood the danger before we hit the black ice. We stopped just shy of the North/South Carolina border and it was cold.
Saturday we got up early and driving was pretty nice at first as everyone in the Carolinas decided that the weather was so cold they would stay at home in case the weather did something nasty. It didn't last for very long, but was neat while it lasted.
We rode into the timeshare complex around 5pm and Mrs Stevie went to check in. I don't deal well with the check-in drones' attempts to upsell us and Mrs Stevie's attempts to get free stuff without going on a four hour kidnapping tour and sales-pitch, so I sit in the bus and fulminate while she deals wth it all.
She returned remarkably quickly, smiling hard7. It turned out that for some alchemical reason I am still unclear on, the timeshare conglomerate had decided that because the first Saturday of the year was on Jan 1st, it didn't count and therefore we were a week early8. "Lots of people are making that same mistake" a smiling employee told Mrs Stevie. Mrs Stevie pointed out that perhaps some sort of warning that this bizarre calendaring had been decided upon could have been sent to owners and thereby the issue could have been avoided. The timeshare people decided they could pretend it was our week even if we differed on how many Saturdays had elapsed in 2022. Our unit was in use, but they found us another on the same block, so it was all OK. Ish.
The weather during our stay proceeded to be foul. Cold and wet. Think English autumn. Scratch that. Think Welsh autumn. In mountain country.
We had decided that we had nothing to do but spend time with the Stevieling and her hubby on this visit, but they had an unusually busy social schedule so we only saw them for a couple of days.
So we made the best of things by bickering and arguing, as couples do, until it was time to leave for NY again.
The drive back on Saturday9 was not bad, we were a long way from the blizzard ravaging NY that day, but we made a very early start on Sunday so as to avoid the section of I95 in Virginia where everyone forgets how to drive10. About the time we got to that section Mrs Stevie had the idea that the driveway would be blocked by the 18 inches of drifted snow a neighbor was reporting, so she called a plowing service and got our driveway cleared. Sorted. Everything was looking good.
Of course, it was too good to last.
On entering the house I detected that it was in fact colder inside than it was outside, and it was below freezing outside. Yes, that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Slant Fin furnace had shut down, by the feel of things about ten minutes after we left the house bound for the balmy drizzle and cold of Florida despite having a nice new thermocouple fitted only six weeks before when it shut down until John the Plumber could get it going again.
Mrs Stevie sprang into action as I struggled fruitlessly to light the pilot. She called John the Plumber. He, bless him, loped over and got the furnace started, but it shut down about 45 minutes later. John opined it needed a new gas valve and politely asked if he could come back the next day. There being no option, it being night on a post-blizzard Sunday with the likelihood of the gas valve stockist being open standing somewhere south of nil, I agreed this was acceptable.
As I was having this conversation there was a loud crash from the kitchen followed by some light, glassy clinking. I ran into the kitchen but could see no obvious fallout. I thought it might have been the final wheel of the microwave cart giving up the ghost and collapsing like the other three have under the loads Mrs Stevie put on it11, because the cart is where we store our liquor supply12 and the bottles might make the clinking noise. No matter. Anything not on fire or leaking was by definition OK.
I deployed our only space heater and Mrs Stevie slept in an armchair with it pointed at her, she cocooned in blankets with an electric heating pad. I initially put all the rings of our cooker at full blast, and to be fair that was effective, sorta, but the thing it was most effective at was melting our hot air fryer standing next to the cooker. So that worked. I retired to the unheated front downstairs bedroom and slept fully clothed with two heating pads between the top sheet and the comforter, reasoning I slept in an unheated bedroom while a child so no big deal.
It was bloody cold. Every three hours the heating pads shut down so I could experience what it would be like to be on Scott's expedition team. I kept warm by re-activating the heating pads and moaning piteously in a manly fashion.
The next day I rose early, chipped he ice off my beard and started to make tea. On opening the cup cabinet I discovered the real reason for the crash and clinky noises. The top shelf of the cabinet, the one with a bunch of wine glasses on it, had suffered the failure of the little pin-brackets that held it in place and fallen onto the shelf below. I rejoiced in my good fortune in discovering a lateral bracket failure, the sort that drops one end of the shelf onto the content of the one below, rather than the one I found last time, a longitudinal failure of the front brackets that rigged the cabinet o' canned goods as an elaborate Laurel and Hardy-esque booby trap and cost me severely smashed feet as I unsuccessfully attempted to catch the avalanche of a year's supply of canned soup.
John turned up clutching a universal gas valve13 as I was finishing unloading the shelves and removing them. He went downstairs, fiddled and swore and announced thet the gas valve he had wouldn't fit14. He spent the next three hours trying to find a gas valve that would fit the Slant Fin furnace of rebellion, found one in Hicksville, bought it, brought it then fitted it and for a wonder the furnace15 burst in to life. The baseboards began to warm and I did a little dance of victory but couldn't help noticing that John was not joining in. If fact he was positively pensive. Measurably morose.
"What's up" I asked, hoping for something un-furnace-related.
"I don't feel any circulation in the upper circuit" he said, gripping a pipe gloomily. "You can feel the downstairs is working fine."
I gripped the pipe he indicated.
"See? Red hot, just like it is supposed to be. This one is just warm from conducted heat from the pipes. I think the pipes upstairs are frozen" he said, and I thought I detected a hint of plumberly predation through my watering eyes, though I was somewhat preoccupied hopping round the basement with my right hand clenched under my left armpit while gnashing my teeth so hard the enamel was flaking off them.
He opined I should use space heaters to warm the upstairs, and told me how to shut down the water should the pipes have done what pipes always do when they freeze, smiled appreciatively at my heartfelt wails at the sight of the bill, accepted a check for his servces, helped me stamp out the spontaneous fire that started in my checkbook and departed Chateau Stevie.
I also departed, bound for Blowes where I had reason to believe I might locate the extra space heaters I would need, and the brackets I needed to fix the kitchen cabinet almost getting arrested for setting off the smoke alarms at the checkout when my visa card melted. I was escorted to my car, drove home, deployed the new space heaters in the freezing upstairs bedrooms,and began work on the cabinet restoration. This involved drilling out the shorn-off pins, then drilling out the mounting holes as the pins on the new brackets were a different size than the old ones, and slowly losing the will to live.
But the fun was just beginning.
I wandered into the upstairs and noted that the space heaters had the upper rooms at 70 degrees in a remarkably short time. The "working" baseboards were only managing to raise the downstairs by a couple of degrees an hour, because the house structure was so cold. Yay, space heaters!
I wandered into the downstairs bedroom and was greeted by the sound of indoor rain. I drew the curtains and saw that most magnificent sight, the indoor (hot) waterfall all made more beautiful by the backdrop of trees through the window. Pausing only to deploy a towel and some appropriate Class Three Words of Power I ran downstairs and pulled the valve to shut off the flow of water to the upstairs heating zone. Then I ran upstairs (twice) and zeroed out the upstairs thermostat, and then back down to the bedroom to call John the Plumber.
Which was when the front downstairs bedroom ceiling fell in, dousing the carpet, bed, my everyday leather jacket16, my guitar, two autoharps and my strumstick in a mix of water, gypsum sludge, clods of orange fiberglass and clumps of the water-logged white Mammoth-hide insulation that was used when the house was built.
I opined to the air that this was in fact the most vile turn of luck one might encounter so early in the year, and to reflect on the irony in that if we had found out about the timeshare calendar debacle in time we would have been home when the furnace failed and avoided what would surely be a very inconvenient and expensive series of events-to-come, but I did so using far fewer words on account of needing to find buckets and a stick to poke holes in the ceiling so more of it wouldn't come crashing down. It was all very tiresome.
John the Plumber arrived the next day with his son17 and they proceded to replace the split section with PEX, a sort of plastic pipe that apparently can resist splitting better. I think copper has just become so expensive post 9-1118 it is no longer cost effective to use it for pipes. It also has the advantage it is attached by snap-fitting rather than soldering with heat19.
Once the repair had been made John, the other one, turned on the water just a bit so we could watch the second leak soak into the basement and ruin another wall and some hall ceiling.
John asked if there was a crawlspace access hatch. I said no, I didn't think so. We went back and forth on this for a bit, then John said he'd make a hole in the back of the Stevieling's former bedroom closet.
"No problem" I said and opened the closet to dislay the problem. Mrs Stevie had already used the closet to store clothes (because all the other closets in the house are not, apparently, enough for the Fall Collection) and every single Playmobil figure, vehicle, boat, ship, plane and playset ever made except for the castle20. So it was with much cursing and red-face that I emptied it out so John (the same one) could make a new inspection hatch with his mighty sawzall.
I retired out of theater, but could hear the gentle re-assuring bursts of foul language as John crawled through the tiny space and replaced another eleven leaks.
It was finally over, and John presented his new bill, which I greeted with the proper crying, wailing, tearing of hair and howls of "Why me?" and I deployed another check drawn upon Stevie's Magic Bottomless Money Bucket, and the Two Johns departed, slapping each other on the back and trading ideas on how to spend their new-found riches.
At least the heat was working.
John the plumber had suggested a firm for the damp mitigation steps needed next, and we argued the insurance company into using them. They arrived, talked a good game and described the pulling out and putting back needed, all with many re-assurances. It was only after the hall ceiling was down that I discovered they weren't going to put anything back. That would be the job of the "construction contractor".
Another call to the insurance people garnered the sniffed news that the firm they originally wanted us to use would indeed have put it all back. So Mrs Stevie called that firm and suggested that although they had lost the original demolition work due to a "communication issue"21 perhaps they would like the contract to rebuild. They would, but couldn't start until an estimate was made, and the first opportunity to do that would be next week.
Since I was rapidly running out of available time off, we tearfully begged the assessor to come on the weekend and they finally agreed once the acceptable grovel-threshold had been achieved. So we are looking forward to that.
And last night, around 6pm, the furnace c/w new gas valve and thermocouple, shut down.
John the Plumber ran over, poked the furnace, got it working again and opined that the Aquastat Relay22 was failing intermittently. He suggested I find one, buy it and he'd fit if for me. A quick search and call-around to local suppliers revealed that the part was discontinued and they did not have a substitute. Mid-search the furnace shut down. I wiggled wires, banged solid-looking components hopefully, then poked the armature of the relay and it closed with a loud click like a bone dislocating and the boiler fired up.
The saga continues.
- which we worked out saves us about two hours of transit time per leg by not stopping and buying prepared meals2 ↑
- and besides Covid, refusal to mask up in Southern States and why encourage that?↑
- Maskerade this year↑
- By saying "For the love of Azathoth will you please get a storage unit near you? I will pay for it!"↑
- There's a video out there of some people in Georgia watching a minivan sliding sideways directly toward them down an ice-encrusted hill, and they only think to take evasive action when the vehicle is literally an arm's length away↑
- Nope, no climate change here↑
- I have learned to fear that smile↑
- After spending far too many brain cycles milling this idiocy I believe it may be because the fourth Saturday of the month was in fact the end of the third full week ↑
- we say the fifth in the month, they say the fourth↑
- the same place where the blizzard stranded people for 24 hours two weeks ago↑
- Mrs Stevie remains obstinately ignorant of the nature of gravity and weight when it comes to putting things on top of other things, and the three wheels I could actually see had surrendered to the Atlasian loads the cart had been called upon to support in defiance of its design specs↑
- Something I was feeling more and more would be useful in the very near future↑
- The proper part was not to be had for luvner money, apparently↑
- Universal. Right↑
- Now re-christened Start You BLEEPing Bastard↑
- My genuine Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator T2 souvenir motorcycle jacket!↑
- Also John. Does that make them John the Plumbers, Johns The Plumber or Johns the Plumbers? I have no idea↑
- We use an awful lot of it for making ammunition↑
- No burned hands, no impromptu fires. Where's the fun in that?↑
- That is in the basement. I checked↑
- Specifically the abundance of misdirection communication being done before the walls were pulled down↑
- Not a plumber-made-up part name. I checked↑
