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sawtooth temperature waveform
Tuesday, November 16 2021
Due to either clerical incompetence or an error of some sort, Medicaid still thinks that Powerful is living in Suffolk County on Long Island, which was where he was living when he was 16 back when he was arrested in connection to a murder that would put him in the New York State prison system for 24 years. Normally Medicaid pays for transportation to required for a biopsy, which Powerful now gets on a weekly basis to determine if his transplanted heart is being rejected. But because they think he lives in Long Island, that couldn't be arranged for today. Andrea (who was spending the night in Tivoli to help with this first post-hospitalization appointment and other things) tried to arrange a Lyft instead, but apparently no Lyft could be obtained at 5:00am in Tivoli, which was when it would've had to have been to make it to a 7:00am biopsy appointment in Westchester (who schedules these things?). Andrea called Gretchen this morning at something like 6:00am to tell her that the Lyft wasn't coming through and that she'd managed to move the biopsy appointment to 9:00am. But this still meant that Gretchen would have to get up before 7:00am, drive to Tivoli, and then spend all day with get Powerful to and from his biopsy appointment, something nobody else with the ability to drive (Andrea has no license and Powerful cannot drive for six months) was willing to do. I'd normally go to the office today but the dogs would need to be walked, and I didn't want the chaos of taking them to the office, so I decided to work from home.
When I looked at the graph of the cabin temperatures coming from its MySpool device, I saw the tell-tale saw-tooth pattern two instances where the mercury thermostat had turned on the generator, which had lead to a spike in cabin temperatures. The spikes began were only two-degrees high, going from 48 to 50 degrees and indicated the generator had run for about an hour each time. After switching off, there was a gradual decline back down to 50 degrees that lasted about four hours, meaning the "duty cycle" using the mercury thermostat is about 20%. Ideally, the thermostat would heat the cabin for longer and then spend more time waiting for it to cool back down again, but this isn't bad performance for an entirely mechanical control system. It was sunny today at the cabin, and this caused a more gradual climb in temperatures due to passive solar heating beginning at around 9:00am. Then after the sun faded behind the clouds, the cabin cooled down again and the generator-induced sawtooth temperature pattern resumed at about 4:30pm. You can see this pattern in the temperature graph from the MySpool device here (from 8:00am the next day):
Gretchen returned this afternoon declaring that she would never ever do a nice thing for anyone ever again, the implication being that no good deed goes unpunished. After taking Powerful to the hospital and dropping Andrea off at the train station (she was returning to Washington, DC after only a brief visit), Gretchen had frittered away a couple hours thinking that at the end of that time, Powerful's biopsy would be done and they could return to Tivoli. But then Powerful had called and said the procedure hadn't even been started yet. This threw Gretchen into a fit of despair. Was she really going to spend her entire day waiting around for people not to do the things they said they would? After a call with Powerful's social worker, it had somehow been arranged for him to get a Lyft back, so Gretchen had been free to go. Gretchen took some pain medication (the Moderna booster shot was still kicking her ass) and climbed into bed.
Some time passed and then Powerful called saying he was on a Lyft, but because of another miscommunication, its destination had been set to our house in Hurley instead of Powerful's new place in Tivoli, something Powerful said he was powerless to change. The thought of having to be in a car for another hour (the time it would take to drive Powerful from our house to Tivoli and then return home) threw Gretchen into a rage-tinged despair, and she asked Powerful why he hadn't called the social worker to fix this. But when Gretchen called the social worker, she learned he'd already fixed it and Gretchen would not have to be driving any more today.
At around that time, Gretchen alerted me to the fact that her website had been replaced with ads for lady viagra. Investigating the issue, I determined that someone had managed to upload several PHP files into her webroot and also install a .htaccess file. I've seen this happen before; the people who do this never actually gain control of the server, but they can nevertheless replace a website with crappy spam that nobody would ever deliberately want to see. Not knowing what else to do, I replaced the damaged files and hoped for the best. I also changed the FTP password and the Godaddy.com PIN, though that was probably unnecessary. Talking about this later with Gretchen, I made the observation that the internet has made us all vulnerable to the worst people in the world in a way that was impossible back in the simpler times of, say, the early 1990s.
This evening after a punishing day of spelunking through Angular data plumbing, I drove out to Home Depot to get the supplies necessary to permanently and conclusively fix the cellar door at the Downs Street brick mansion. This included a pressure-treated eight foot two by eight, a sack of mortar, and various screws and other fussy bits. While in the Home Depot, I noticed an alarming number of people were going maskless, which seemed inadvisable given the emergence of yet another coronavirus wave in the northeast.
At Downs Street, I quickly determined that the existing door frame was actually pretty solid after the temporary fixes I'd made some weeks ago. So all I had to do was remove the cellar door from its hinges (not easy given the brass screws designed for old-fashioned flat screwdrivers), cut a quarter inch off the bottom, and rehang it. After that, the door swung freely and was easy to open, close, and latch. To further shore up the wooden frame it hung from, I injected a lot of spray foam into its many voids and added a little treated lumber in the big void at the bottom. Spray foam doesn't initially seem like a good substitute for mortar, but if there's enough of it, it can lock structures in place fairly tightly. As for the mortar and two by eight, I left them in the Downs Street basement for possible future use.
On the drive home, I celebrated the unexpected ease of my door-fixing success by drinking the rest of a Monster energy drink I'd bought at Home Depot and had already begun drinking.
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