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.