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42 degree cabin
Friday, November 5 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
At 4:00pm, Gretchen and I began our drive to the Adirondacks, though we stopped on the way at the Cricket store at the Kingston Plaza (in Uptown) to get Gretchen's new Cricket phone first. It was possible she could've simply put a Cricket SIM card from her old phone (now about a year and a half old), but a new phone would only cost $20 after all the sausage-making of our new plan was completed. Today we worked with Brandi, who not only transferred Gretchen's number to her new phone (a Motorola Moto G Power, which Powerful also now has) but also consolidated all our various plans into one family plan of four unlimited lines (for me, Powerful, my brother Don, and Gretchen) and the 15 GB/month WiFi hotspot at the cabin. Because of a discount on accessories related to all the plans, Gretchen also ended up buying a small bluetooth speaker.
Brandi asked at some point if anyone in our household qualified for assistance to help pay for cellphone access. At first we thought this wouldn't apply to us (we're decidedly in the upper-middle class at this point), but then we realized that Powerful probably does qualify, since he gets SNAP and is on Medicaid (which is how he paid for his brand new heart, which normally cost $1.6 million). Furthermore, my brother Don also qualifies. This made Brandi very excited, and she re-ran the numbers applying a $50/month discount (paid for by a temporary pandemic-related government program). The result was that all of our phone lines plus the cabin hotspot would only cost us $85/month. That's less than Gretchen had been paying for the Spectrum plan that provided lines for just her and Powerful. Obviously, Powerful, who had been paying Gretchen directly for his part of her phone plan, would no longer have to pay anything at all. This whole procedure took about an hour but was well worth the trouble. It also left us feeling pretty good about Cricket, even if it does have the feel of a down-market phone provider, the kind of business where it's normal for customers trudge into the store every month to pay their bills because they can't maintain a reliable bank balance.
Gretchen spent nearly the entire drive up to Albany getting the Spectrum Wireless plan turned off. She kept getting bounced around between departments, none of which claimed to be responsible for service termination. It began with a nice gentleman with a light southern accent who seemed to be stoned and continued through a woman who couldn't hear Gretchen through our car's bluetooth. Ultimately the service was canceled, we think. By the time Gretchen was paying attention to the landmarks outside our window, were only about six miles east of the Pattersonville Rest Area, where I stopped for an urgent piss break. Gretchen drove us from there, occasionally asking what to do at intersections because she still doesn't have the navigation committed to memory.
We stopped at the Johnstown Price Chopper for groceries, and it was Gretchen's first time ever being in the store. I showed her to the hippie vegan refrigerated foods section, where she got a thing of tofu patties, and then we went through the store buying various things. The Price Chopper harbored a few surprises: Hellman's now makes a shelf-stable-until-opened vegan mayonnaise, so we bought a jar of that. And now even Campbell's makes a plant-based chicken noodle soup (though it uses egg noodles, which keeps it non-vegan, because they insist on keeping a foot in the 1970s I suppose). Evidently Campbell's, which has always been a rather tired soup brand, has decided to sink some claws into cutting-edge trends in soup, hoping to bypass Progresso perhaps (which is also a fairly tired brand, though not as tired as a soup to which you famously had to add water).
After five days of no active heating, it was 42 degrees Fahrenheit in the cabin when we arrived. This was cold, but not too bad; it meant the cabin had come nowhere near cold enough to damage the plumbing. But perhaps due to the low temperatures, the starter battery in the generator was dead, though it didn't take me long to jumpstart the generator using some fat cables I'd brought. Amazingly, the Moxee mobile hotspot was still operating off the car battery I'd left to power it last Sunday. I hadn't expected it to still be running.
I went down to the basement and found temperatures were 48 degrees down there, which suggested the concrete was still able to radiate some residual summer heat (and probably even heat from released by its continued curing). The boiler, however, seemed to be heating the house way too slowly, with temperatures rising by a modest degree every half hour or so, and that was with a raging fire in the woodstove in addition to hot water circulating in the base-board radiators. I had better look at the boiler and seemed to identify a possible problem: the hot water leaving the boiler was mixing with colder water coming back from the radiators before being set to the radiators again. That didn't seem to make any sense. I was also dismayed to see that there was no turnoff valve between the household cold water and the closed-loop of the heating system, meaning it would be impossible to introduce antifreeze into the system without first having to do some plumbing rework (that is, installing such a valve). (I would also want to install a drain cock in the hydronic plumbing on the second floor, which would allow me to introduce antifreeze from the top, meaning I wouldn't have to pump it into the system.)
I explained these things to Gretchen, and she left a message with Joe, the project manager. By the time we went to sleep, temperatures were only in the mid-60s.
First, though, I installed the custom medicine cabinet I'd built last week. It looked handsome there on the wall, and Gretchen seemed to be more delighted by how "deep-dish" it was (it fills the whole six-inch-deep inter-stud bay) than she'd initially indicated she would be.
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