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a particularly bad time not to have a working refrigerator
Monday, November 25 2024
This afternoon while Gretchen was off at work, I did a little much-procrastinated work applying for jobs and entering data into my application history in the New York State unemployment system so I can have something there before my next in-person meeting on December 6th. After just a little of that, I needed to reward myself by working some more on the new stone wall I am building at the bottom of the Woodshed Trail. The wall has now grown a dozen or more feet eastward of where it had been as recently as this weekend and isn't more than thirty feet from the Stick Trail itself. It looks really good, with a nice regularity to the stones that only comes after multiple passes of adding small rocks to the initial jumble.
A little later, I took Charlotte for her customary second walk of the day, one Neville decided not to join us on. I did the usual loop that started on the Farm Road and Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then short-cut over to the Stick Trail. When I got to my big stone wall a little south of the Chamomile, I saw that strong winds had recently knocked down an old dead hemlock down across the wall, dislodging a few stones and leaving a notch less than a foot in depth. (This indicates that the wall has good compressive strength.) I decided to immediately repair the damage, though I did so in the way that I always repair stone wall damage: by reworking the damaged area literally from the ground up, making that section more like the kind of purpose-built walls that last hundreds of years. I fetched some nice big flat rocks from further down the hill and used the dislodged rock (augmented with additional pieces) to build a tower outside (slightly north of) the original wall footprint. I then capped it with two large rocks, one of which was so heavy that it was a little difficult to lift to the necessary height. I then filled in the spaces between them with smaller rocks, producing a solid tower to better support the weaker sections of wall on either side of it.
Meanwhile, Gretchen's parents were slowing making their way northward from Washington, DC in their electric car. Something about the trouble they always experience when going on long drives in that car suggested to Gretchen and me that they do not understand the difference between the various levels of EV chargers. They themselves depend on a level-1 chargers, since the place they live (the Watergate) does not officially provide access to 240v. (Unofficial access rampant, though not in the parking garage.) When Gretchen talked to them on the road, they spoke of how difficult it was to find chargers and that the charger they'd found was "slow" but "not as slow" as the one they use to charge at the Watergate. Gretchen did her best to clean up this mess by finding them an Electrify America charging station near where they were (East Brunswick, NJ) and telling them that they should use nothing else. With the charger they were using, she stressed, they might get 20 to 30 miles of range after standing around for an hour. With Electrify America, on the other hand, they might fully charge their battery (over 300 miles of range) in that same amount of time. Normally Gretchen's father is unusually tech-savvy for someone his age (which is now fast approaching eighty), but I think his limited travel with his EV has allowed him to avoid learning what one needs to do when driving one as far as the distance from Washington, DC to Hurley, NY.
Gretchen's parents finally arrived not far past 9:00pm, at around the same time Gretchen hollered that our kitchen refrigerator was no longer keeping things cold. That was such a crisis that my hellos with Gretchen's parents were perfunctory at best. I mostly wanted to focus on figuring out what was wrong with the refrigerator. I found a couple battery-powered temperature probes (which wasn't easy, since most of that monitoring equipment is at the Adirondack cabin) to put in the refrigerated and freezer sections. They were both showing temperatures in the 50s or 60s (Fahrenheit!), which is not good. This was why nearly all the ice in the freezer was melted and items that would normally be solid objects were now bags filled with various molten objects. We'd be having a lot of people over for Thanksgiving, so it was a particularly bad time not to have a working refrigerator.
Gretchen and I had eaten earlier (the food consisted of yummy stuffed shells), so when Gretchen's parents sat down to eat stuffed shells, we sat across from them eating nothing. By the end of the meal, it was clear that there was no obvious fix for the refrigerator, meaning we would need to replace it. (I'd tried listening for a running compressor, and the data had been inconclusive over the noise of the oven fan and Gretchen's conversation with her parents.) It had survived a little over ten years, which was better than the eight problematic years we'd gotten out of the one before it. So I started taking everything out of it and moving the things that needed to be frozen to the big freezer in the garage and moving everything else to the table out on the east deck. Outside temperatures were a little warmer than a refrigerator should be, but we didn't have any good alternatives. This took a surprising amount of time.
Later in the evening, we all sat around the fire while Gretchen's parents (particularly her mother) told me all about the survival saga of a trio of motherless lion cubs in the Nambi Desert she'd learned about via some television program she'd watched. But she's a surprisingly bad story teller, so I had to keep asking questions to get the facts necessary to have the story make any sense, as she kept skipping over crucial (and very interesting) details. And then Gretchen's father told me the biography of the naturalist presenter David Attenborough. I was getting very very sleepy during all this, and the reason for this turned out to be that it was after 1:00am.
As I was getting ready to go to bed, I was puzzled by the fact that Charlotte the dog was nowhere to be found. I checked all her usual place and went outside to holler for her in the yard, but she was gone. This wasn't a huge concern, since she often goes on her own little adventures. But it being late and the fact that I hadn't seen her in a couple hours made me a little concerned.
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