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constant unsuccessful battle to get comfortable
Tuesday, January 27 2026
At 4:00am this morning I made the mistake of trying to get back to sleep with the help of a little gin mixed with snow and an ambien. I didn't really notice the ambien kicking in at all before I fell asleep. But this morning when I awoke I had a strongly dysphoric feeling that was noticeably worse than hangover-related dysphoria. This started me off on the wrong foot for the day, and the rest of it turned into a constant unsuccessful battle to get comfortable.
While Gretchen was off a pilates early this afternoon, I dug a path through the snow from near our front door all the way to the Farm Road, with the hope being that Charlotte would use that path for her impulsive self-directed wanderings, which had mostly been out to the road, since that was the only cleared path (and she was showing a reluctance to go bounding through unshoveled snow).
Then I decided that a bath would be perfect, both for my dysphoria and for muscles aching after so much snow shoveling. But when I went to run the hot water in the upstairs tub, absolutely no water came out. Evidently it had been so cold for so long that freezing conditions had penetrated from the outside into the inter-joist space under the entryway inside our front door and frozen the hot water pipe. (This happened once before some years ago.) Meanwhile the cold water pipe, which runs across the same voids three feet closer to the center of the house, remained unfrozen. I rigged up a space heater to warm one of the inter-joist spaces (reachable via rectangular holes in the basement hallways ceiling that have been present for year), and when that didn't seem to work, I started warming another. I noticed that, as with the upstairs bathroom, the sink in the downstairs "Roman bathroom" had running hot and cold water, whereas only the cold water worked in the tub, as the sink was closer to the source of the water and evidently the ice blockage lay in a pipe in the basement ceiling between where the pipes branched off for the sink and where they branched off for the tub.
After waiting for hours for the blockage to melt without any results, I decided I needed a different technique. The hot water pipe runs alongside a hydronic pipe that carries heated antifreeze to our living room when the boiler is on. So I turned on the boiler and turned up the heat in the living room. I had running hot water once more within about a half hour.
By then, Gretchen was back from pilates, but soon she would be going out again, this time to guitar practice. Finally, it seemed I could take a nice relaxing hot bath using water freshly heating by burning oil and flowing through a fat one inch copper pipe freshly cleared of ice. But I wasn't in the bath long before I heard some sort of commotion as Gretchen was leaving. I couldn't relax in the bathtub with that going on, so I climbed out of the tub dripping wet and walked across the house to see what was going on from the laboratory window (the only window in the house with a clear view of Dug Hill Road). I saw Gretchen was now parked on the side of Dug Hill Road with a state trooper car behind her and she was out of the car talking to the trooper. After a minute or so of that, the dogs started getting interested and Charlotte began walking slowly out towards the road in our driveway. By then Gretchen had gotten back in the car and continued down Dug Hill Road. The trooper was right behind her, though he slowed down to note Charlotte in our driveway and then continued with his lights on for some reason. There is a state trooper who lives about a quarter mile further north up Dug Hill Road, so I assumed this was that guy. But what had he talked to Gretchen about? I climbed back in the tub, but I couldn't really enjoy my bath anymore, as I thought perhaps the trooper had warned Gretchen about something, probably Charlotte and her penchant for wandering the neighborhood (something her tracker has made clear she does on a regular basis). While I was in the tub a second time, the dogs started barking, and so again I got out and went dripping to the laboratory window to see if maybe the trooper wanted to talk to me now. There is a set of wooden steps up to the laboratory window, and as I was coming down from those and stepping over my mother's old PowerPC (which I have temporarily parked at the bottom of those steps) I slipped on the some of the water I'd tracked over and skinned the side of my left shin on the bent sheet metal just inside the top of the PowerPC (I'd removed a plastic top, which would've been less hostile). Fortunately the bend in the sheet metal was somewhat rounded and all it really did was yank out an inch-wide line of leg hair.
At that point all I could do was shave and shampoo my hair, because I was no longer enjoying the bathtub. After I got out of the tub, I bundled up and went outside to shovel the snowplow snow away from the mailboxes; we hadn't received mail in two days and I figured the snow might've had something to do with it.
I then proceeded to make one of my vegetable soups, leaning heavily on small red potatoes, broccoli, some less-than-ideal asparagus, and leftover tofu, mushrooms, and onions from last week. For crushed tomato content, I added some very old pizza sauce that had miraculously not yet gone moldy and still tasted almost okay. Near the end I added some shell-shaped noodles and a small container of lemon juice Gretchen had told me about. I just dumped it all in without thinking, and the soup ended up being more tart than Gretchen liked, but for me it was great that way. She added leftover barley to temper the tartness, and I added oyster crackers.
I should of course mention what it is that the state trooper had talked to Gretchen about. My mind had been racing the whole time Gretchen had been gone, but all it had been was that the trooper had seen Charlotte in the Farm Road and wondered if she was a stray or something. Gretchen had quickly explained that no, she has a pet door and can come and go as she likes and that she often wanders across the Farm Road into the nearby forest. Gretchen didn't mention Charlotte's fondness for straying further afield across Dug Hill Road, of course, but the trooper was satisfied and apparently went on his merry way. I don't know why he'd been flashing his lights, but Gretchen is such a lead foot on Dug Hill Road that he probably never caught up to her.
After Jeopardy!, Gretchen and I watched the first episode of the first season of Nathan for Your, a quasi-reality show hosted by Nathan Fielder, the guy who brought us the Rehearsal. In Nathan for Your, he's much younger and his persona is more confident and less wishy-washy. In this episode, his schtick was that of an absurdist business consultant who comes up with ideas such as feces-flavored frozen yoghurt and tiny pizzas to give to customers when their "eight minutes or it's free" pizza is inevitably late. It was funny stuff, though a lot of it was cringe-inducing.
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