December Diaries: Dec. 1st
Boilers and Other Marvels
Woke up this morning to the news that we need a new boiler. Joy. Cannot stress enough how much has broken this year. In fact, I can hardly remember how much has broken this year. In March, the old water treatment system began mysteriously spitting chlorine solution over a mostly broken television set placed near it in the basement. As far as I know, this wasn’t a personal vendetta against the television set, it just happened to be there. Of course this happened when our engineer and long-suffering maintenance manager-in-residence—I like to call him “Dad”—was our engineer and long-suffering maintenance manager-at-large due to a trip to Florida. If only he’d known, perhaps he would have stayed.
If he’d stayed home, maybe the water system wouldn’t have broken just then. I swear the house knows when he leaves and becomes petulant. A house is another kind of body. Sometimes this one has a mind of its own.
Maybe I should explain about the old water system and the TV. The following is from a letter I wrote in April, telling my cousin all about it.
One of the absolute marvels of living in modernity, which we do, is municipal utilities. Their history in the United States is long, storied, and abjectly corrupt, but they exist and we are grateful. Water and electricity, trash collection, they’re all-important. But, they can’t get everywhere. Electricity mostly does, but water can be harder to route around. Our house, like roughly 23 million other households in the United States, is on a well. The problem with well water is that it comes right out of the ground in which the well is drilled, and it can be extremely variable, depending on what’s going on in the ground. Our well water has methane, sulfur, and a ton of minerals in it, which all need to be dealt with before we use it. We have a Series of Tanks in the basement with various pumps and mysterious functions to take the absolutely horrifying water that comes out of the ground and turn it into the nice, clear, functional water we use for things.
One of the processes that the water goes through is being treated with an intense chlorine solution. The chlorinated water is run through a heavy-duty charcoal filter afterwards, which strips the chlorine back out again. Chemistry! If I had known I would be living in this house someday, believe me, I would have paid much more attention to it in my high school years. Maybe I would have retained enough for that to be helpful now. Maybe.
Another important background factor in the story is that we have an old plasma TV set that we’re going to get rid of. It’s old, and if you watch for more than about an hour, it throws off about as much heat as a fireplace. Not good. So, for lack of a better place to put said fireplace—I mean TV set—I stuck it right in the middle of the water system. There’s enough room for a TV to slide in amongst the various mysterious water tanks, and we just needed a place to store it for a couple of weeks until our local recycling center restarts its electronic recycling days again. They only do this from April to November.
So. Complex water system I do not understand in basement. Old TV in same part of basement. Nothing wrong. And so our story begins.
It was Thursday. Unlike Arthur Dent, I do have the hang of Thursdays, and think they’re generally pretty nice. I went out grocery shopping—Ellis was feeling under the weather, so I wanted to make them some chicken soup—and when I came back, two brand-new pieces of information presented themselves.
The basement smelled like an indoor pool.
The old TV was… wet? It was WET. It was wet with CHLORINE SOLUTION? Nothing around the TV was wet. Not the floor. Not any of the water tanks. Just the TV. There were little bleach-drop-drails running down it on both sides.
Two options were before me.
There was a mysterious leak somewhere in the tangle of pipes and hoses and tanks that is the water system which we need to shower and cook, with which I am not exactly on a first-name basis, and the person who knows that water system better than anyone is 1500 miles away.
The old TV is being haunted by chlorinated ghosts.
For a hot second I wished it was ghosts. I thought they would be easier to deal with.
Nothing was actively leaking! So I wiped up the bleach-water. I went upstairs. I put the groceries away. When I went downstairs to check on how things were going, there was more water just on the TV. Huh. I called the water system servicefolks. The woman who answered the phone was very nice, but she told me they couldn’t get me a service appointment for two weeks, and I said—I am proud of myself—“Look, my problem is that I have chlorinated water spitting out from somewhere, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
She said she’d see what she could do.
So now I have a haunted television set and intermittent chlorine shooting around courtesy of the pump that’s supposed to be injecting chlorine into the water system automatically. Which means, I thought, that all the chlorine that is SUPPOSED to be getting into the water is not getting into the water. That’s bad.
I called Bob. He was concerned. I was concerned. We proceeded to text for hours about chemistry and chlorine solutions and the upshot of that was I unplugged the pump and for the next four days, I added chlorine directly to one of the water tanks and that seemed to work out nicely. I was a tiny chemistry god. It was a good feeling.
That was Thursday. On Monday, Joe came from the water system place and found the leak only because it actually got chlorinated water on him while he was standing in front of the line that had the hole in it at that moment. It turned out the line had broken and the hole was in the exact place to squirt out over the TV, and nowhere else. Haunted situation. But it worked out! It was only a little insanely stressful!
Being an adult is bizarre.
We have a new water system now, courtesy of another water-related disaster in August. This one was caused by a well-drilling incident next door, and we’re all recovered from that. Physically, if not emotionally. And yes, I did write my cousin J an explainer of municipal utilities. I am who I am.
Just got back from the movies. The Marvels—so much fun. I liked that it wanted to be more lighthearted, and I think it managed that without losing stakes. It succeeded for me. And that post-credits scene! I practically bit through my sweatshirt. Much to the amusement of my dad.
Went to therapy yesterday. Left feeling self-conscious about how much I spoke. Is this common issue, or have I attained new heights of anxiousness?
Today I will leave off with a book recommendation. The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski. Incredible book about death and ways to live. It might help.