If You Can't Stand The Heat, Don't Flood The House Then Get The Insurance Company To Call These Guys

The HDE's finally declared la Maison Stevie to be moisture free this morning and switched off their fans and dehumidifiers prior to removing them. I immediately opened all the windows and the back door and was pinned to the screendoor as a swash of superheated air burst from the kitchen, followed by a cooling mistral as the house resyncronized it's internal weather system with that outside.

All my mouldings have come off the walls on account of the glue being superheated and dessicated and the mouldings themselves changing dimensions as any hint of moisture was torn from their molecular lattice. My latest copy of Asimov's Magazine has delaminated into individual pages since the inside temperature long ago exceeded the melting point of the binding glue. On the plus side, no mould.

It is quite novel now to turn on the cold tap and actually get cold water from it. For the last four days the pipes have been so warm the water needed to run for several seconds before it was cool. Even the drinking water faucet was compromised since the filter cylinder represents a hefty thermal reservoir. Pouring water over ice often resulted in icy shrapnel exploding from the glass and the simple act of taking medications required laboratory grade safety glasses. I almost miss the howling gale produced by the fans that meant anything lighter than your average DVD had to be anchored down with a DVD or be blown all over the house a-la tumbleweed.

All that remains to be done before we get in the builders is to clean up all the cacti and cattle skulls dotting the living room.

Boiling My Bottom at La Chateau Stevie

So, the insurance compay sent round some house disaster recovery specialists who poked the walls, celings and floors with a thing that looked like a cattle prod and swept them with a thing that looked like a stud-finder and declared that everything was dry as a bone. Then they remembered to switch their sensors on, repeated the process and declared that everything was wringing wet.
"No kiddng?" sezzeye.
So the expert house dryers deployed four huge "high grain refridgerant" deumidifiers and four hurricane strength portable wind machines and left saying "keep them turned on and the windows closed until we call again later next week".

Well, it's been two days and I've noticed the following side effects of this plan:

1. no-one can hear what anyone else is saying even if they are shrieking so hard their Starbuck's Extra-large Mug O'Triple Espresso is sloshing everywhere
2. It is 97 degrees F outside. It is 102 inside
3. My skin is so dry I'm starting to look like Joan Rivers
4. The gale force wind howling into the downstairs bathroom causes the toilet paper to self-deploy all over the bathroom unless you jam the roll with a broomhandle

The upstairs bathroom turned out to have two layers of sheet rock per wall, being constructed "Gennaro fashion¹". The house drying experts (HDEs) demanded the right to pull down one layer. I said they could do what they had to since the rest of the bathroom was such a write-off. The floor tiles all came off the plywood subfloor, which delaminated and is now like a big springy wooden book. The commode has come adrift from its seal on the floor, and some of that seal broke away and ended up in the downstairs bathroom. This is now an ex-bathroom.

Just when I thought things had reached rock bottom, my UPS² suddenly reconfigured itself into an IPS³ and began powering my computer down unexpectedly.

Life sucks.

Earlier

On Friday evening, as I was driving to my bi-monthly Dungeons and Dragons manly high stakes poker game, I was listening to "In The Court of the Crimson King", the first King Crimson album and a perenial favourite of mine. As the band hit the jam in the middle of "21st Century Schizoid Man" I looked out of the side window of my car and noticed that the pink clouds and blue sky mimicked, to my mind exactly, the pink of the face and the blue of the background from the inside cover art of the album and a feeling of rightness, of something completed settled over me. Funny thing, life.

You take the flint nodule in your hands and examine it carefully. You turn it just so and strike it with the deer antler you shaped specially for the task, and a flake of glasslike rock shears off and lands in the grass a few inches away. You pick it up very carefully, minding your fingers and give it the once over. It is good, but not great, destined to be a skinning knife, but when you look back at the surface the shard came from, you can see that the next flake will be a perfect arrowhead.

There are two great satisfactions in life: one comes from things you do with your own hands and brain, the other from things that are. Your lover's face as she/he lies asleep. Your lover's reaction to your touch.

Life is good.

1: See Mother's Day Job, posted ages ago.
2: Uninterrupable Power Supply
3: Interrupting Power Supply

It's Always Darkest Before LIPA Fixes The Bloody Transmission Lines

The house is still wringing wet, as my sense of smell informed me when I entered it last night at around 7:15pm. Mrs Stevie and I decided we would eat out after setting up various fans and a dehumidifier, putting another load of washed clothes in the dryer and moving a shovelful of soaked ones from the laundry room floor to the washing machine and setting everything in motion.When we returned at about 8:45pm the house was in darkness. A quick check proved that yes, LIPA¹ had decided to get in on the Plumbing Fiasco of Mildewing by preventing us running any sort of heat and damp mitigating appliances.

We decided to pick up the Stevieling and deal with the issue of whether to get a motel room or tough it out. Mrs Stevie called LIPA and spent a pleasant 25 minutes in their Humanless Problem Reporting Bot of Uselessness. They said it would all be fixed "by 10:30 or 11:30". I took that to mean 12 to 1am and we decided to tough it out, first of all in the swimming pool and then in the coolest room in the house. No sooner did I pull the solar cover off the pool but I got a call from LIPA's jaunty Robot of Glad Tidings.
"We understand that your power is now on. If this is true, press 1. If this is not true, press 2." I peered at the keyboard by the light of a Coleman lamp and pressed "2".
"We now understand that your power has not been restored. We appologise for the delay in service". And that was the last I heard from the stupid buggers.

Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling decided to turn in, but I couldn't take the heat inside. I opened every window and the back door to try and get a breeze in, but the air was dead still (of course). I was about to kip down on the sofa when it occured to me that we could all be murdered in our beds by some fiend cutting through the screen door. The answer was obvious. I would sleep in Mrs Stevie's outdoor recliner direclty in front of the door and block access to my loved ones using my body. In deference to Mrs Stevie's views on impromptu naturism² I donned clean underpants before exiting the house and spent 3½ hours trying to sleep under the stars. I almost had the trick down pat when the power finally came back on, around 3:30am. I quickly decamped to the front bedroom with the others and set the small airconditioner on "Preserve Fresh Meat". Thus do I arrive at work refreshed and rested after the hottest night of this year so far. Well, if you can call 3 hours of sleep "rested", which I can't.

When LIPA was formed to replace LILCO³ it was on the grounds that LILCO was screwing up and overcharging. First order of business was to give the outgoing CEO a $48 million payoff for all his good work. Next was to screw around with the service calling, formerly so easy it almost worked itself, and make it "more efficient" (br reducing the incidence of actual service calls made). Third order of business was to raise the electricity rates significantly. So much for LILCO's overcharging. Fourth order of business was to replace the humans in the call center, who had the singular advantage of being able to write down the F*&^%ing street where the problem was with an automated one that "figures the problem out" from the home phone number you supply around 5 minutes into the voyage of discovery when you call the bleeding thing. Christ! This is supposed to be the most cosmopolitan town, in the most cosmopolitan country in the world. They can't even get a simple job like ensuring the power infrastructure can cope with expected and predicted demand in the summer. In reality, most NY utilities (such as Con-Ed, LIPA, Keyspan⁴ and the Long Island Rail Road to name but four) couldn't organise a decent piss-up in a brewery or get you laid in a cat-house. This city never sleeps? It's been comatose for so long someone should pull the plug and put it out of its misery.

1: Long Island Power Authority
2: See the hose incident from Monday
3: Long Island Lighting Company.
4: The Gas service that took over that part of LILCO's operation.

When I'm Wrung Dry, I'll Stop Awhile And Think Of You

Yesterday, in the deep, dark, early morning of 3:30 am or thereabouts, I awoke to the sound of pouring water, and thought sleepily that there was nothing nicer than the sound of torrential rain when one is snug and cosy inside. The weather has been building to intolerable levels of heat and humidity in New York and a good thunderstorm was exactly what the doctor ordered for a cooler, saner week.

Then the thought came that the water sounded as though it was pooling somewhere close by, to a depth of not less than a few inches judging by the sound. Moreover, it sounded as though it was coming from the direction of the bathroom rather than from over my shoulder (the direction of "outside" at that moment). I began to suspect my wife had left the bathroom window open and that the rain was being blown inside the house, and so I got up and made my way to the hallway where the sound of the water was much louder and nearer and the hall lights didn't work. An ugly suspicion formed in Mr Brain.

I stepped into the pitch dark bathroom and was greeted by a refreshing cascade of lukewarm water rushing in great torrents from the drop ceiling and pooling to about three inches on the bathroom floor. I ran upstairs. Sure enough the carpets were soaked and when I entered the bathroom there I could hear the sound of high-pressure water spraying from under the sink. I opened the vanity and was greeted by a facefull of water. Having discerned the location of the leak I ran down to the basement (now a delightful wading pool for children of all ages) and shut off the water supply. I couldn't budge the local shut off valves (or risers) under the sink as they had frozen solid sometime in the late Permian so went in search of the valves to isolate the upstairs water supply from the downstairs one, only to find that Mrs Stevie had walled off the access to the service corridor behind the laundry room with a formidable wall o'crap. I managed to relocate that and waded to the control valves. The handwheels were positioned for maximum challenge in amongst pipework remeniscent of a Mousetrap Game and wouldn't budge. I went back for Mr Stilson's pipe wrench and finally managed to shut off the upstairs water supply so I could turn the downstairs one back on again and begin manning the pumps.

Deciding that the job was a little much for my trusty Shop Vac (normally the first line of water removal ops) I deployed Mr Submersible Pump. Normally, I pump out the Shop Vac using this and run a hose out to the King Crimson Maple at the property's southeast corner, so I opened the basement window and pulled on the hose, which obliged me by refusing to enter the basement any further than about five feet.

Heaving a sigh and a few swear words I de-alarmed the house and went into the garden with a flashlight to uproot the hose, which had become bedded in the lawn over the last few weeks. When I entered the house I ran into Mrs Stevie who became agitated over my state of dress. Thus I was forced to suspend vital getting-the-water-outside-the-house ops to defend my decision not to pause to don clothing for an EVA into my own well-fenced back garden at 3:45 am (well before dawn).
"You can't walk around the yard in the nude!" she yelled.
"I have other priorities than finding appropriate digging up a hosepipe in the pitch dark attire!" I wittily responded.
"What about the neighbours?" She snarled.
"The neighbours have a perfectly good yard of their own should they wish to partake in the new fad of midnight togs-off garden appliance rearrangement. That being said, if they wish to stroll around mine au naturel they are welcome provided they agree to help drain the basement of the floodwaters" I responded and went below to do just that.

I won't go into tedious detail of how much valuable and irreplaceable (largely paper-based) stuff was lost despite being placed on shelves high off the floor (who knew the water would come from above and run latterally for several feet before descending?). I won't detail the part where I went into the laundry room, badly overcrowded with clothing no-one wears any more and the subject of many Stevierants on the value of walling up closets so we can't get to them with stuff we don't need, only to have an overloaded shelf full of towels with a nice display of shirts hung underneath (now soaking wet and ten times their dry weight) tear out of the wall and nearly crush me. I won't detail the bit where I poked the ceiling light fixture of the downstairs bathroom with a finger and it shattered, slashing my hand quite nastily and releasing another ten gallons of water to the floor. I won't even detail the part where it got bad.

I took the day off work and after grabbing an hour's sleep started to clear up the damage at 7 am. I ran flying leads to the laundry room so I could run the washer and dryer, since the electricity supply was still tripping the GFI (I suspect a light fitting was full of water). I still didn't know exactly what had blown upstairs¹, so ran to home depot and bought a new faucet and flexible couplings, which I installed with much cursing only to find the bloody tap leaked so I had to pull it out and replace it again. At 4:30 I had managed to get the upstairs water turned back on and was busy clearing out the detritus from the downstairs tub so it could be brought back into action. This was when Mrs Stevie rang to tell me that we were going to have to meet the park-and-ride for the Stevieling's gala performance at 6, but that her brother was due chez moi at 5 and that I should "finish getting ready". It was 4:30 and I had just discovered that the tub wasn't draining due to a pre-flood problem no-one had thought to mention (I do not use this tub; it ia a "girls only" one reserved for Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling). Since she was interrupting vital plunger operations I had less diplomacy in me than Hezbolla and I snarled "Who's getting ready? What in God's name do you think I've been doing all day?" into my cell phone and she hung up. After that it was the matter of 15 minutes to nip upstairs, make three trips to what was left of the laundry room with wet towels used to mop the floor by Mrs Stevie and left there for me to find, pick up as much of the remains of the vanity as I could (chipboard does not handle soaking well) and get a shower before everyone started arriving home.

I reckon I've got Frank Lloyd Wright beat. His water fell oustide the house. Mine washed through it. I dub Chateau Stevie "Fallinghotwater".

1: Turns out the flexible coupling for the hot water supply had burst. Thus, not only shall I be paying for the water, but also for the gas needed to heat it. Doubtless it has also taken 5 years off the life of the water heater too.