Tag: housing

Weekly status update [0056/????]

The weather’s been pretty nasty here this week. So I guess it’s a good thing I almost never leave the house?

  • My heating system completely failed sometime Sunday night. It took until Wednesday for it to get fixed; it was just a blown fuse. Fortunately my landlord loaned me some space heaters in the interim.
  • Played lots of videogames. Along with finishing Horizon: Zero Dawn, I’ve also made my way through Batman: The Telltale Series, which was quite good, and started on their Game of Thrones title. Plus there’s the most-nights EDF4.1 pew pews, and Overcooked! 2 on Thursday.
  • So far so consistent with Tabletop Simulator on Thursdays as well; we played Aeon’s End again this week. And Friday night was a “shorter games” game night at a friend and old coworker’s house; we played a bunch of different things. The highlight was an extremely tense game of Tempel des Schreckens where I had to do some of the most creative, wheeler-dealer lying I’ve ever had to do in a social deduction game. I also bounced hard off of Deja Vu, bailing on the game after a single round.
  • I’ve been slowly reading Sarah Rees Brennan’s first “Lynburn Legacy” book, Unspoken. It’s… fine, but definitely not the lightning in a bottle that In Other Lands managed to capture. I also read Auggie & Me, a collection of three short stories that paint in some gaps in the narrative of Wonder. Inessential but quite readable.
  • The third season of The Expanse was excellent through and through, and I am delighted to see that it’s been picked up by Amazon Prime for at least one more season. The only other thing I’ve been watching is keeping up with Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which feels just as good after the network switch as it did before.
  • I actually did some puzzles for the first time in a while. I’m almost done with Penpa Mix 2019, having done all of several types of puzzles in the book. I suspect when it’s all said and done the slim volume will have taken me somewhere around 30 hours to complete (but I plan on doing the math to see one way or the other).
  • You know that annoying thing where you know you’re eating properly for, like, a week plus, but the scale refuses to budge even though there’s mathematically no way you shouldn’t weigh less given caloric intake? Yeah. That’s been this week for me. Fortunately I resisted the siren call of “screw this, buy some Biscoff cookie butter at Walmart” that rang in my head most days when I saw the numbers. We’ll see how much longer I can resist.

I’m going to try and finish that first Lynburn book today, even though I find myself putting it down for just about any reason I can devise. Then I think I’ll finally read Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book that has been “things Phil is interested in”-adjacent for too many years to still leave unread.

Weekly status update [0054/????]

Beep boop.

  • I finished up Russian Doll on Netflix, which was absolutely fantastic and should be watched by everyone reading this. Yes, even you. I also started on season three of The Expanse now that it’s free on Amazon Prime and have been enjoying it quite a bit.
  • As rambled about at length earlier this week, I finished up the last of the Ezio Trilogy games this weekend and am not touching another Assassin’s Creed game until the remaster of III comes out in March. I’m not really looking forward to it–III is not a very good game–but I’ve already decided that I’m not going to be platinuming it, so the experience will at least be mostly casual rather than the completionist torture that the last few ended up being.
  • Most evenings have continued to be filled with playing Earth Defense Force 4.1 online with friends, which is actually a quite pleasant way to fill the time. I’ve even started streaming it on occasion, and several people have tuned in that aren’t personal friends. Exciting!
  • Time spent not on the television has mostly been devoted to reading. I finished up The Prestige, which was fantastic, then moved on to Wonder, which was a nice light read. Then I read In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan, which was so good. Like, seriously. So good. It’s a LGBT coming-of-age portal fantasy novel that’s way, way more than the sum of its parts, and I liked it so much that I did something I don’t know that I’ve ever done before: I read it twice. (I did read another book in the middle, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon, which sadly was neither part of his Mars trilogy universe nor particularly memorable.) I mean, I’ve re-read books plenty of times in my life; Greg Egan’s Quarantine is basically falling apart due to how many times I’ve read my copy. But twice in the span of three days? Never that I know of. So good.
  • Still puzzlin’.
  • There were mysterious clanky noises coming from the heat pump outside. It took a long time (too long) for my landlord to get someone out to check it, and by that point it was no longer making mysterious clanky noises. We shall have to see if it starts up again. I hate this particular song and dance.
  • Despite the fact that it was Valentine’s Day, I still managed to play a bit of Tabletop Simulator with a friend Thursday night. Won at Dominion, lost at Lost Cities.

Boop beep.

A screeching start to a new life

Last night, as I was preparing to go to sleep, my heater kicked in one final time with a loud skreeeeeh from outside before steadying out to the usual thrum.

I thought: Are you frakkin’ kidding me?  My first day of retirement is tomorrow and the heat’s going to be broken.  I can’t even go into work to escape!  And then I did what just about everyone in such a situation does: I climbed into bed and sincerely hoped that the HVAC Faeries would magically fix the problem while I slept.  As they do.

This morning I peeked out of my bedroom window at the condenser.  It hadn’t exploded overnight–you’d think that would have woken me up, but you’d be wrong–but I did notice something suspicious.  A shiny, glinting layer of ice covered most of the top of the unit, with only a small hole in the center where air could actually make it through.

I bundled up, crept my way through the soggy backyard in the bright morning light, and looked at it more closely.  Apparently a perfect combination of rain and cold caused a thick sheet of ice to form on top of the condenser.  Actually thick, as I noticed when I tried to break some off with my bare hands; half an inch or so.  (Here is where I regret not taking a photo; sorry about that.  I’ll do better next time.  This whole “letting people know what’s going on in my life” thing is kinda new to me.)

Back inside to grab a nice heavy fork, back outside to start banging slash chiseling slash scraping the ice away.  Ice chips flew everywhere, hitting my sandaled feet, skittering off into the damp grass, but soon enough I cleared almost all of the ice from the top of the unit.

I tromped back inside and walked over to the thermostat.  Moment of truth: I bumped it back up from the chilly 58° I leave it on overnight to the toasty 64° I keep it during the day.

Thrmmmmmm.  No awful screech, just the comforting hum of a properly working heating system.

Thank goodness.  One day of disaster averted.  How many to go? How many to go?