Windemere

        For once I've had a weekend of drudge, toil, and home improvement that has ended with significant gains. All too often I've toiled and toiled and worked and worked to have little or nothing to show at the end. Lots of work got done, but it might all get covered up. Or it was replacing or updating something that existed. Like replacing electrical wiring. It is not a very uplifting feeling to take an entire weekend to go from "Cool the hall light works" to "Hey the hall light works again but I'm a couple of hundred bucks poorer, my back hurts, my knuckles are scraped and I don't know where my weekend went."

        During the pre-Thanksgiving sales extravaganza, Best Buy had an amazing deal on a washer and dryer. Those who have followed the progress of things to date know that the existing washer and dryer were only functional long enough to satisfy the home inspection and then promptly died. Months and months of dragging all my clothing over to the laundromat each week is not at all my idea of a good time. Laundry is, in fact, one of my least favorite chores around the house. But that is all about to change. Actually it won't change a whole lot. I will still hate doing laundry. But I will have a really nice washer and dryer to help take the edge off the hate.

        Of course, one can not merely buy a new washer and dryer. No not here at Windemere. There must be much preparation. The existing washer and dryer were totally awful. And their connections to the electrical, gas, and water systems were equally horrific. I disconnected the washer to find that both the hot and cold water shutoff valves were totally shot. After a few minutes with the vice grips I was able to stem the flow of water from niagra down to merely a small drip. The dryer had no direct shutoff valve for the gas line. This is frowned upon by current code. No big deal, I'll just shut down the main gas valve at the meter. The only problem there was that the valve seemed to be frozen. Alright, no biggie just check in with BGE.

        BGE actually has a pretty decent website and there are specific links and instructions to the effect of "If you have one of the following 3 deadly situations SHUT OFF THE COMPUTER AND CALL US NOW" My situation didn't seem to warrant running out of the house in a blind panic and calling in the cavalry so I filled out the online e-ticket and went merrily on my way. I got a call and an e-mail back the very next day that indicated that I probably should have just called the emergency line. For some strange reason BGE takes the maintenance and distribution of a highly flammable and explosive gas very seriously. But the frustrating part is that they will not schedule the work. Someone needs to be home between 6am and midnight. We'll be there sometime in that ballpark. Oh, and it might not be today, it could be tomorrow if we get another emergency call.

        The very idea of this leaves me perplexed. Who has the kind of job they can just randomly sit around the house one day with no notice. I'm trying to figure out what customers of BGE, that actually pay their bills, can afford to sit around the house all day waiting for the gas guy. If you know of someone and she's cute and single please leave me a comment below with some contact info because I'd sure like to meet this person. I clearly do not have this mythical occupation that allows me to drop my world and sit around the house waiting for someone who may or may not show up. But then the weekend came and I was actually planning on being home and working on the house on Saturday.

        It is amazing to me how motivated to provide good customer service an agency can be when there are serious consequences (like death, property damage, and explosions) to leaving someone on hold for most of their adult life or randomly canceling or not showing up for service appointments. A quick call to BGE's emergency line on Saturday and within 15 minutes someone was knocking on my door. When I called in and got through the couple of menu choices for "gas emergencies" I was connected to real person in less than one ring. They collected my information and said someone would be out sometime that afternoon. And by jove, they were. And as I said, not even fifteen minutes later. The service guy was great. Basically he just told me to use a bigger wrench to open the valve. Not having had to deal with gas service much, and being rather intimidated by the prospect that an error on my part is likely to cause spontaneous combustion and, more than likely, annihilation of my entire home I had resisted the urge to wail like a maniac upon the gas valve with a large wrench. Ron from BGE had no such compunctions. Now that I had the green light to beat the bejesus out of the gas valve I was good to go.

        Things that have been held up for months in Catch-22 links of dependent tasks all of the sudden fell into place and I was able to make serious progress on a number of things that had been held up by this one silly valve. First was disconnecting the dryer and getting it out of the way. Then I finally was able to get rid of the little stub of a gas line sticking up through the middle of the kitchen floor. A trip to the hardware store for some new pipe, fittings, and valves and I had plumbed in new gas service for the dryer and for the stove above in the kitchen.

        This is not to say that all of this went flawlessly and without effort. There were some water lines and drain lines that had to be re-located. Gas pipe fitting does take some time and patience. It did take a second trip to the hardware store to get more stuff. There are still some maddening sequence of tasks that have yet to be resolved. Foam wall insulation needs to go against the foundation before anything else. But the wall insulation will catch fire when I go to do the plumbing that is in front of the insulation. So the plumbing has to be done first and then I can go back and try to jam the insulation behind the plumbing. Not impossible, just still a lot of work.

        But the best thing was that at the end of this weekend, unlike so many other weekends of labor I had something to show for my efforts. There is now a regulation gas connection all set and ready for when the dryer gets here. At long last the one reasonably functional appliance that came with the home, the stove, is connected and functional. I have been limping along for months with a kitchen that would be considered under equipped by a team of rabid outdoorsmen who were planning to summit everest with just what they could carry on their backs. There are certain things that you just need a stove for. You just cannot do pasta in a microwave or on the George Foreman grill, despite my best efforts.

        Pasta has always been one of my staple easy to throw together at the end of a long-day dishes. I have missed pasta like a fat kid on Atkins. And for the first time in months I will be able to go home tonight, fire up my stove, boil up a pot of fettuccine, simmer some Alfredo sauce, and sear a chicken breast with lemon pepper and olive oil. I may even fire up the oven and warm some bread or something just because I can. And I will raise my glass of red wine and dig into my pasta and remember why it was worth all that effort.

        Usually starting an enty is pretty easy for me. Some recent event has made my eyball twitch and my hands can barely keep up with the torrent of frustration poring through my mind. But this week, there have been so many things that I am virtually at a loss for where to start.

        To give a quick overview, no heat, another tree fell, then there was snow, still no heat, laundry room in progress, still no heat.

        Ok, we'll start this alphabetically by order of pissoffitudiness. No heat. This has been an ongoing drama and does not seem to want to end. A couple of weeks ago I called the home warranty company and had them come out to repair the boiler (details of that adventure are here) The poked some things and made heat happen. All was good. Then the heat stopped working. I poked the boiler and got heat to work again.... for about 12 hours. Then I poked again in a different spot and got the heat to work agin.... for about 12 hours. As of last night I poked it in the last reasonably pokable place and only got a few hours of heat before it cut out again. My plan was to call the warranty company today to get someone schedule to come out and make things right. When lo and behold they called me this morning instead. But they weren't calling because they've got Miss Cleo working for them. No they were calling to inform me that the flue damper they changed out last week wasn't actually going to be covered by my warranty because they don't cover "electronic energy management systems" To which I replied. Umm... Bullshit.

        First off the damper is part of the boiler system. The boiler is designed so that if there is a flue damper connected it will not work without it or if the damper is malfunctioning. Secondly the boiler is just a tank of hot water, and you know what makes that water actually get hot. AN ELECTRICAL CONTROL SYSTEM that turns the gas on and off to make hot water. So I very elegantly explained this to the warranty company. And backed it up with the fact that the service guy they sent out called back into his office to have the warranty company confirm that the flue damper was a covered item. And they confirmed for him that it was indeed covered. At this point she had the good sense to tell me that she'd look into it and call me back. She could probably hear the eye twitching over the phone. About 15 minutes later she did in fact call back to let me know that they'd cover the part "this time". As if I were trying to pull a fast one on them. Their contractor checked in with them and said this thing was covered. NOT MY PROBLEM.

        Now that we had the first service call resolved it was time to once again poke the bear. Now you're never supposed to poke the bear. Because the bear is big and poking the bear makes it mad. But that's the fun. I called again this afternoon and reported that I once again had no heat. They decided to re-open the existing ticket. Which is good for me because I've already paid the deductible. Despite my grousing at the idiosyncrasies of navigating through the warranty process everyone has been pretty pleasant and helpful. I may have spent half a day on hold to get through to someone, but that person did actually make things happen. Although things are not yet resolved and it has taken longer than I'd like. They are actually working in earnest to make things right and have been good about scheduling and following up etc.

        The service contractor called me this afternoon and we talked through a couple of things. Yup, checked that. Yup, checked that. Yup, checked that. In the end, the service guy and I came to the same conclusion. The boiler is busted and needs some new control parts. Electrical control parts. I can't wait to see what they say about this item when he submits it. These boiler control things are of course only made by left handed aboriginal midgets in the heartland of Sudan on alternate Tuesdays when it isn't the rainy season. Which means they won't be able to get parts until at least Monday. So I will be stuck without heat for the weekend. Stay tuned for more news on this developing story.

        The second drama of the week was the major wind storms we had at the beginning of the week. I came home one evening to find a 20' tall tree lying sprawled along the curb and my front sidewalk. Just as I was about to start making calls to friends and family for chainsaws and pickup trucks it dawned on me. Wait a minute that's not really my tree.

        The tree is right in front of my house. And technically may-be on my property. But it was planted in the narrow band of grass between the curb and the sidewalk. Here is where the magic begins. For those who may not know, the land directly at the edge of your property really isn't yours. Most any municipality reserves these border spaces as rights of way for whatever they'd like to do. Be it a sidewalk, gas line, sewer pipe, utility pole, whatever. This first 5 or 10 foot strip technically belongs to the city, and is generally it is referred to as a setback. As a homeowner you're not really allowed to do much in this right of way zone, but you are required to maintain it. But you aren't required to maintain what the city puts there. If they put in a gas line, it isn't your problem to take care of it. It is their gas line. In this case, the tree was planted directly in what I will deem the "not my problem" zone.

        Since I had so cleverly determined that this was not, as it might at first appear, my problem and was in fact "somebody else's problem". All that remained was to find out who's problem it was and let them know that they should come take care of their fallen tree. To the Web!!

        Baltimore City has a really decent online presence and a top notch city services site. The best part is they have an online work ticket submission system called CitiTrack. Plain old ordinary city dwellers like myself can go online and pick from a menu of different things that the various city public works departments take care of and submit a work request. As luck would have it, right there in bold shiny Verdana text was the listing for "Forestry Tree Road Hazard" and "Forestry Tree Removal" Huzzah! A couple of quick clicks later and my request was submitted.

        One of the things I like most about the CityTrack system is that I don't have to wait on hold for someone. I don't have to talk to any disgruntled city employees. I can get my requests in in the middle of the night instead of having to deal with this stuff during the two hour window on alternate Thursdays when their people actually answer phones. The other great thing? The system works beautifully. The very next day I arrived home to find 90% of the tree had been cut up and hauled away. The remaining large trunk of the tree was laid neatly at the curb and marked with a cone. And the following day they came and dealt with the trunk. I never saw anyone. I never talked to anyone. And within 48 hours they completely dealt with the problem. As long as I don't see a bill for this I will gleefully pay my tax bill.

        This is not the first time I've dealt with CityTrack with similarly amazing results. During my sewage issue I also used CitiTrack to get the dept of sanitation out to check out their lines. And similarly I was able to submit a request at 10pm on a Sunday night while sitting on my couch and bright and early Monday morning they were out taking care of things. I don't care very much which city administration made this happen but I am exceedingly greatful for the service and can happily report that at least one thing the city government is doing is great and is very well done. I just wish they had some mechanism on their site to allow me to let them know how much I like their system.

        Our last tale of drama for the week is the snow. There actually wasn't much in the way of drama associated specifically with the snow event, except that it happened right in the middle of having no heat and the tree falling so it somewhat complicated the process for the other dramas. But it did make everything look nice. A nice blanket of snow really makes it feel like winter. It also really helps with the whole holiday spirit. Christmas just isn't quite the same without some snow.

        Since I had no heat at home I took advantage of the heater and heated seats in the car to warm up and go drive over to Hampden to see the Miracle on 34th St. Every year this one-block section of Hampden goes completely over the top with oudoor lighting. It is both the the tackiest, most overwhelmingly ostentatious display of Christmas lighting exuberance and a truly heartwarmingly beautiful and inspiring sight.

        I am one step closer to fully embracing what it means to live in the 20th century. No longer will I have to drag my clothing down to the side of a stream bed and roll up my pants and wade out into the frigid water to beat my clothing against the rocks to get them clean. Nor will I have to pack up a trunk load of clothing and make the crosstown trek to the laundromat to plug quarter after quarter into the machines and then haul it all home again to fold, sort and put away.

        Alright, I'll be honest there really hasn't been much of any folding sorting etc. Everything has just been coming home in the laundry basket and I've been living out of the laundry basket. If you have seen my closets you'll know that a couple of laundry baskets basically hold way more clothing than even the double closets in my room. This is definetly on the list of things to address at some point in the future. But up until this point since I had to make a weekly pilgrimage to either the stream bank or the the laundromat it didn't really seem to matter a whole lot that the clothes didn't have a more permanent place to live in between their weekly travel adventures. I like to think of it as sort of a nomadic existence for my wardrobe.
        As with all things though, every era must come to an end. While my clothing has been treated to weekly (alright not always exactly weekly) trips to exotic and foreign locales, they are getting of an age when settling down into a routine that involves less travel has become appealing. As we transition from our wild mis-spent youth into settling into early and middle age so too does our wardrobe need to settle down and embrace the stability of knowing that a short trip to the basement will soon be as fulfilling and refreshing as the wild adventures of the past.

        Now all I need to do is figure out if the odd socks that don't match up coming out of the dryer are the offspring of wild youthful sock exuberance while on travel, or the result of the passing of an honored and respected member of the sock community. Only time will tell.

        So what punishment is fitting for someone who steals a package off of your front porch that has the Christmas gifts for your parents in it?

        I am at a loss for words to describe how frustrated and despondant I am over this. I have ordered dozens of things through Amazon over the past couple of weeks and the one box that has gone missing had my parents gifts in it.

        The holiday season means many different things to many people. For some the holidays are about gifts, for others it is about family joining together, others celebrate their religious faith, for others it is gorging upon an endless buffet of carbohydrate filled delights. To me, the holidays are (or should be) a time to think of others. I love the holidays and Christmas for the opportunity to shop for gifts for others. This is not to say that I don't very much enjoy getting gifts, but I truly do enjoy bringing some level of happiness to someone else through a thoughtful gift. It is not about what the particular gift is so much as the thought behind it. Taking enough time and paying enough attention to someone else in the world to think about them and their needs or wants for a bit. And perhaps more importantly taking some time to wrap the gift. I will not go into a detailed rant about wrapping gifts for now, except to say that giving an unwrapped or poorly wrapped gift is tantamount to "Here I bought you this thing" presenting a nicely wrapped gift is "I thought of you and I wanted to share this thing with you as a small token of appreciation" This may well be the topic for a rant in the future but my topic for the day is something different.

        I did most of my gift shopping this year online. And most of that at amazon. Amazon and it's network of merchants, gift and wish list management and amazingly easy checkout process is just truly inspiring. To be able to sit down at the computer and go to one website where I can pull up everyone's wish lists and my gift idea lists, drop everything in a shopping cart and then divy up the shopping cart to have everything wrapped, gift cards attached and sent to all the various destinations all at once is an absolute lifesaver.

        Each year Amazon has continued to improve their online shopping experience. In fact I think I got about 90% of my Christmas shopping done in a single evening sitting on my couch sipping hot chocolate and clicking away on amazon. Over the past couple of weeks I've been getting packages almost daily with the various items from my shopping list. Some items I did send directly to the gift recipient, but many of the gifts I wanted to get and wrap before sending out.

        My many items ended up being broken out as several different orders coming from several different amazon vendors and were destined for assorted addresses. All of this is horribly horribly complicated on the back end of things, but is made exquisitely simple during checkout.

        Of course there are no free rides in life, and with all things easy, simple and good there needs to be some balance to keep the karma folks happy. So there must be difficulty, complexity, and grief of some sort to balance out the ease of online shopping. This balancing was meted out this year in the form of one of the shipments disappearing.

        Amazon's tracking information indicated that the item had been delivered but I had no package. Now of course the missing package wasn't a discount six-pack of tube socks or some small stocking stuffer paperback book for a random cousin or something along those lines. No, the one package that went missing contained the gifts for my parents. I had gotten an National Geographic coffee table book for my dad and and iPod nano for my mom. Somehow these two items ended up in the same shipment and this one shipment disappeared. The most exasperating thing was that the package arrived a couple days earlier than they had projected on a day when I happened to have been home less than two hours after the delivery.

        After several days of fuming and worrying, contacting amazon etc I happened to be taking the trash out and noticed some discarded packaging in my open garage. It was an amazon box. It had been opened and pilfered but oddly enough there was something small still in the corner of the box. The iPod. Some stupid crackhead had stolen the package off of my porch, taken back into the alley and in the relative safety of the garage opened the amazon box and taken the coffee table book and left the iPod. I'm pretty sure they just overlooked it as the package the nano comes in is just a small non-descript white cube of plastic that may be confused with packaging material.

        I laughed out loud when I found the iPod. I had finally figured out what the appropriate punishment was for the stupid crackhead who had stolen my parent's Christmas gifts. Their punishment was to leave behind the expensive electronics and take the book. I guess Baltimore is the city the reads after all.

        Just in time for the festive holiday season, the Friday before Christmas, my heat once again went out. This time I did not go downstairs with a large wrench and a mean look on my face. I did not pull out the ohm meter and attempt to figure out what had gone wrong this time. I did not pass go, nor did I collect $200. I packed a bag and called my warranty company.

        The past three or four times that I've lost heat it has taken a few days for the warranty company to send someone out to check things out. In each case I have lost at the waiting game and have been unable to wait out the cold. Each time I have sworn that I will not touch things, I will leave them broken so that things can be fixed correctly. Each time the overwhelming coldness has won out and I have broken down and worked on the boiler and made it work again before the plumber came out. In each case I didn't really fix anything or replace anything. I just poked and prodded at things enough to solve whatever minor part of the puzzle involved in firing up the boiler that had been stopping things that particular day. The unfortunate part of this was that neither the plumber or I were then able to make things stop working when the plumber showed up. So they'd have to scratch their head and claim that all was well.

        This time they told me it would be the following Wednesday before they could send someone out. That was 4+ days away. I packed a bag and told my parents that I'd be coming to visit for the x-mas holidays.

        The plumber came on the 26th and pronounced the bolier broken. They needed a part. In fact the very same part that I told them they would need when I called and told them it was broken back on the 22nd. Of course they didn't actually have this part and they were going to have to order it. But in the meantime if I jumped these two wires together I would have heat. Great. The only problem with jumping these two wires together is that it doesn't stop making heat. These two wires just turns the burner on to full and it will sit there merrily boiling away forever until the boiler explodes and or the house is well over 100 degrees.

        While coaxing the plumber to come to the same conclusion I had days before, nursing a mild hangover from a particularly good Christmas party the night before , and shivering I discovered that one of the new GFCI outlets I had installed in the kitchen was tripped. I reset it. It tripped. I unplugged everything, reset the outlet and everything was good. Then I began plugging things back in to see what was tripping out the outlet. It was the mini-fridge that I've been living with until I could afford to replace it with a real full-sized fridge. Siigggh.

        I now found myself in the market for a refrigerator. This was probably one of the last things on my list of "things to spend money on this week". So it was off to the interweb to do some research. After thoroughly looking around I found something I thought I would like at Best Buy in Owings Mills. So I trekked over there and ended up deciding it wasn't really what I wanted. So back to the interweb and more looking and searching and this time the only Best Buy that had the fridge I was looking for was all the way out in Gaithersburg.

        As the crow flies, Gaithersburg isn't all that far away from Baltimore. But as the roads go you can't really get from here to there without trekking across half the state. So I grabbed a van and began the long pilgrimage around the beltways of Maryland and out to Gaithersburg. I checked out the floor model fridge and it seemed like just what I was looking for. Huzzah. But of course our tale does not end here. The only fridge Best Buy had was the floor model. Unfortunately for me, the floor model had some scratches and dents that I wasn't willing to live with. So I had trekked all the way across the state because the interweb had said that this store had this fridge in stock. But there must have been a clogged tube somewhere on the net tha prevented the info from getting to me about the store not actually having the fridge.

        But all was not lost. Best Buy was able to get me this fridge from their warehouse and schedule it for free delivery this Sunday. I just wasn't able to walk home with a fridge.

        My beer is still warm and my house is still cold. but on Sunday I will have this lovely new fridge to keep my beer cool.

And hopefully sometime early next week the new part for my boiler will make it in and I will once again be able to enjoy a cold beer inside my warm house.