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temperature debt
Monday, November 12 2007
setting: Squirrel Hill neighborhood, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The race track survived the night but was in danger of being wiped out by hurricane Sadie, my ten month old niece. It was also threatened by a team of plumbers who had come to investigate a mysterious (though spectacular) leak. Guests, with their unusual activities, tend to stress test a household's infrastructure, and something about how Gretchen's mother had bathed yesterday had sent a quart of water spilling through the glass ceiling tiles of the kitchen.
Everyone was dreading how my young nephew would react should anything bad happen to the racetrack, but it couldn't stay where it was and have any hope of survival. Somehow, and everyone who saw this considered it a miracle, his mother convinced him it would be a good idea to pack it up so it could be reconstructed later tonight in his room. Naturally I was drafted to help with the cleanup, which ended up being the most careful and deliberate destruction of anything my nephew has ever undertaken.
Before long Gretchen and I were driving east back towards the end of Pennsylvania nearest our place. We headed back the way we'd come, through the tunnels of the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Carlisle and then north up I-81 to Scranton, where we dined on french fries and Garden Burgers exactly as we had done on the way out, sitting in exactly the same seat at the same Iron Skillet. It was a different time of day and the deep frier contained oil of a different freshness, so the fries weren't quite as good. It turns out, by the way, that the "iron skillets" that the Iron Skillet uses for serving its burgers are actually made of pewter.
On this drive we were listening to another book on disk, George Pelecanos's Hard Revolution, a hard-boiled crime novel set in the Silver Spring, Maryland area in both 1959 and 1968. (Incidentally, I was born in Silver Spring in 1968.) Gretchen loves crime novels, but they aren't really my thing. I have, however, loved The Wire, and I know Pelecanos was involved in writing one or more seasons of that.
We were home at around 7:00pm after being on the road for seven and a half hours. We fetched our dogs from Andrea's place and I started up a fire. In our absence the boiler had been off and no one had been stoking the fire, so Fahrenheit temperatures had dropped as low as the upper 40s indoors (48 on the first floor, 47 in the laboratory). During that time outdoor temperatures had dropped as low as 24.1 degrees. Interestingly, the lowest temperature in the insulated (but unheated) garage had only dropped to 46 degrees. We'd left an oil-filled electric space heater on low in the upstairs bedroom for the various cats, but still temperatures there had managed to drop to 56 degrees.
After hours of raging fires in the wood stove, I'd managed to raise the living room temperature to 74 degrees. It would take many more hours for me to repay the "temperature debt" the house had accumulated in our absence.
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