One of the great things about Stalin was his gift-giving sense. Take Warsaw, for example: he supposedly gave Poles a choice between a subway and this:
The Palace of Culture and Science (photo by koelk_h).
Apparently, Stalin liked to recycle his gifts…
When the latest of a string of HVAC technicians goes rummaging through your system, tugs on a wire, breaks the wire, looks at it, and says, “Oh, crap,” the only thing left to do is laugh at the whole situation.
The heating system in our house is what’s known as a gas pack: gas heater combined with an air conditioning unit.
It’s great, when it works.
The trouble is, it often decides to stop working. The obvious solution: call a heating/cooling specialist to come take a look. We have. Four of them have come. They’ve all suggested and done different things. The gas pack still refuses to work.
That’s an exaggeration, though, because it does work. It just never works when we leave for a long period of time. It doesn’t matter what we do — turn off the heat completely or turn down the thermostats — the results are the same: it won’t turn on when we get home. Or rather, it won’t turn back on wants it thinks the temperature is correct. It’ll crank up, blow hot air for a while, and then shut off. For good. But not quite — it’s still running. I go outside and put my hand on the exhaust vent (which blows out a fair amount of warm air when it’s working) and it’s cold, though the exhaust fan is working.
Here’s the trick, though: I can get it working again. Beside the unit, there’s a breaker, installed so repair folks don’t have to go all the way to the breaker box to turn off the power. When I reset it there (disconnect the power, reconnect it), the machine turns on, warms up, and everything is fine. However, when I restart it from inside the house, by flipping the breaker off and then on, it will restart a couple of times (repeating the whole blow-for-a-while-then-never-turn-back-on process), and then it won’t restart again. However, when I restart it from outside, it continues working longer. In fact, it works like normal sometimes.
Thankfully our real estate broker insisted on the seller buying a home warranty. We really haven’t had to pay that much for all these visits.
Which leads to the delicious dilemma: to restart or not to restart? The repair guy is coming again this morning. He asked me not to restart it next time it’s doing it’s little on-again-off-again dance, but what can I do? My house is cold; Dziadek gets sick easily; I have a little baby. Of course I’m going to restart it.
“Can’t you deliberately cause the malfunction?” you might ask. No — that’s the annoying thing. Once I restart it from outside, it runs fine more often than not.
The only solution I’ve come up with so far is to take a weekend trip, then call the repair people while we’re still on the trip and have someone be waiting for us when we return.
Or sell the house…
Well, it’s my birthday too…
When I was leaving for Polska the first time, my parents played a little joke on me. I had an old, almost-working laptop that I was planning on taking, and one day, Mom came to me and said she’d bought me a battery for my laptop. “I don’t know if it will work with yours or not, but…”
I looked at it and thought, “Oh dear. Mom’s wasted money. I hope she can take it back.” But I gratefully thanked her and said, “Well, you might be right. I don’t know if it will work with that old lap top.” At which time Dad blindsided me, putting a new laptop on my lap and saying, “It’ll work with this one.”
They did it again.
Piła
This time, with a saw and goggles.
“Dad’s always wanted one of those,” Mom/Nana said.
“I guess he has one now,” I said, “With a place to store it.”
Dziadek was equally impressed, but declared that it was not for a beginner like me. Probably not, but I’ll learn.
All photos are links to more pictures at Flickr.
The main goal of our trip West was to see the Grand Canyon. Dziadek, having been a geography teacher, had wanted to see it for as long as he could remember; K and I, not having had a vacation for years (literally), were eager to take him; L really didn’t care.
I first went to the Grand Canyon when I was eleven. During the intervening twenty-some years, I never forgot about how awe-struck I was when I first saw the canyon.
“I knew it was big, but that big?!”
K and Dziadek had similar reactions.
The GC in winter with a baby is a hectic schedule — into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car. Coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on.
It soon became clear to K and me that this was just a reconnaissance trip, for we must go back and hike the canyon.
A note to photographers: the rocks reflect a lot of light. We found quickly enough that it was necessary to underexpose most shots by 0.7 steps.
The cliche is that a picture is worth some ridiculous amount of words. That really depends on the author, I’d say, but all that notwithstanding, even pictures don’t do the GC any justice. It’s just enormous on a scale that is incomprehensible.
Two hundred and seventy-seven miles long. An average of ten miles wide, with the shortest trail from rim to rim being twenty-four miles long. Five thousand feet deep.
Six million years old, with the oldest layers of rock being well over a billion years old.
It’s like staring into infinity.
During the last few days this evening, L’s begun doing several new things.
Her understanding of communication is simply exploding.
Outside of Boulder City, on the way to the Grand Canyon, we encountered some truly other-worldly views.
The first stop on our week-long trip was Hoover Dam.
To say it’s awe-inspiring is an understatement. Things of that scale are almost frightening, both its size and its implications.
The enormity of the structure is almost as breathtaking as that of the Grand Canyon. Approaching it, you know it’s going to be big, but once you see it, you think, “I didn’t think it would be quite that big.” And it’s not just the dam that’s huge — everything connected to it is enormous: Lake Mead is the largest man-made lake in America; the overflow tunnels, with a diameter of 50 feet, are big enough to drive a truck through.
But it’s the implications that are frightening. Built from 1931 to 1935, Hoover Dam was completed two years ahead of schedule and under budget! Six companies, from Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and California, pooled their resources to create a structure so complicated that procedures and tools had to be invented to complete it.
For instance, the heat created by the chemical reactions of concrete drying would have stretched the process of the concrete setting and drying to 125 years. To combat this, engineers designed a system whereby tubes were run through the concrete and cool water pumped throughout the whole structure. But a refrigeration unit that had such a cooling capacity? It didn’t exist. Yet.
So here’s all this innovation and creation and genius going into one of the most complicated structures in history at a time when a significant part of our population was treated like animals and a psychopath in Europe was laying plans to slaughter six million people because of their religious/ethnic heritage.
Humans can’t be manipulated as easily as concrete, I suppose. Well, I take that back. Humans can be manipulated just as easily as anything else, but most of the time, it’s manipulation towards evil.
More implications: Can anyone imagine an enormous project like Boston’s “The Big Dig” project going under budget and well within the projected time frame? Can anyone imagine Haliburton delivering its services on budget, let alone under?
Still, all these thoughts passed quickly through my mind: we spent most of the time in gaping-mouth awe.
All the prep, all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the — let’s face it — hassle, and what do you get?
First course: barszcz (beetroot soup) with “ears” (wonton-like dumplings)
Second course: wild mushroom soup.
Third course: pierogi (somewhat larger dumplings) filled with sauerkraut and mushrooms.
Fourth course: fried sauerkraut and onions.
Main course: baked salmon, served with roasted potatoes, scallops, and asparagus.
And after dinner, gifts, including a new book for L.
We woke up at some ridiculously early hour — 3:00 a.m., I think — on Christmas morning to pack ourselves into our little TDI and head to the airport to begin a week-long trip to the southwest.
We arrived in Las Vegas some eight to ten hours later: the beginning of a trip to include Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, and Sedona.
But first, a trip to a casino for one of those world-famous buffets. Over-price, generally poor-quality food. Really shouldn’t have expected more.
Then, a stroll through the casino.
Odd — everyone seems to be so bored while playing slot machines.
Still, K, L, and Dziadek were amused.
Every night, after I read to L, I put her in her crib and play guitar softly as she falls asleep.
The other night, a bit more about the “i boom!” mystery came into focus. In the midst of some early-forming nightmare, L suddenly woke up, popped up in the crib, and within a matter of a few seconds was climbing out, screaming and terrified. I grabbed her just as she was swinging a leg up, and she clung to me tightly. Within another second, though, she was awake, calm, and asking me to put her back down in the crib.
“It’s probably nightmares,” K said a few days ago. It seems she’s right.