Greetings, friends. (XLVI)

Greetings, friends. Today the heat went out at the house!

This actually happened over the weekend, which went pretty well. On Saturday, I watched Clue with Lu, and then she introduced me to a TV show called Shoresy, which we binged while a blizzard came down outside.

Incidentally Clue holds up surprisingly well for a comedy from 1985. A lot of comedies from back then don’t. Its impeccable casting surely doesn’t hurt.

Shoresy is a new spin off of Letterkenny, starring Jared Keeso in the eponymous role. Now Letterkenny is one of my favorite television shows, but Shoresy is one of its worst characters, whose performance solely involves lobbing increasingly vicious insults at the other characters from off-screen, usually in the form of ribald claims about the target’s mother. Sometimes the sheer creativity of these gibes is impressive, but I find their quality is exhausted by their quantity.

So I didn’t have very high hopes for the show, which centers on a semi-pro hockey team in northern Ontario, and in this I was pleasantly mistaken. Shoresy is given a much more three-dimensional treatment — yes, he still insults his coach, his teammates, and nearly everyone else in earshot, but he cries during “O Canada,” he shows a romantic side with a sports journalist who keeps him at arms’ length, and he passionately, passionately does not want his semi-pro hockey team to fold, which they are one loss away from doing. This is the end of the road for Shoresy: If his team folds, his days of organized hockey playing go with it.

If you are used to watching Jared Keeso playing Wayne in Letterkenny, or maybe as Chartier in 19-2 — did you know he starred in a Canadian cop show? — then you will be as impressed as I was. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Keeso is unrecognizable as Shoresy. You quickly forget you saw him in something else.

So the character plus the stakes plus the sports setting plus the quirky ensemble cast (a la Letterkenny) turn Shoresy into a kind of rough-edged, foul-mouthed, gloves-off Ted Lasso. Add in the best First Nations representation of any TV show probably ever, and you have a show where you will be rooting for Shoresy and his team of misfits to pull off the all-important W by halfway through the season. I hope they make another one.

On Sunday after the roads were dry, I drove across New Hampshire to have brunch at one of the two brunch places in Brattleboro, Vermont, with Matt and Nicole and Josie, who were on their way south after skiing with family in Vermont. Matt and I had each other in stitches before the food even arrived. Josie taught me how to play Chopsticks, which I’d never learned before. It was worth the drive to see them.

On my way back, Adah called to say that the heat was out, but that the oil company had sent their lead technician (owner?) out to replace what he thought was a busted thermostat. The tech pronounced the problem fixed, so I should have no trouble.

So you imagine my surprise when I got home, and the house was cold, and all the radiators were off. The thermostat was set to 67ºF but the temperature was 55ºF and slowly dropping. The heat was still sort of working in the other part of the house, on the other thermostat, so I knew the furnace wasn’t kaput. Still, these old houses are drafty.

Adah suggested I move to a hotel. I demurred. I figured that I wasn’t going to die of exposure. I threw another quilt on the bed and went to bed in sweats and a beanie. In fact I slept great.

When I got up, I called the oil company. The lead tech sounded a bit miffed at the implication that his handiwork had failed to do the job, but he agreed to send out another technician to troubleshoot.

The kid showed up about an hour later. By this point, I was doing video conference calls for work in long underwear, a sweater, a down jacket, a beanie, and a pair of fingerless gloves.

The guy knew what he was doing, I’ll say that for him. He quickly ascertained that there was nothing wrong with the new thermostat, or for that matter with the furnace, which meant that the problem was the wiring. Which made sense because it was spliced in three places, God knows why.

I wound up having to help him run the replacement wiring through the floor, but he got it working in short order. The furnace came back on. I cheered. I was in fact not going to die of exposure in a frozen house in a frozen godforsaken New Hampshire winter. The bill came to $165 in labor plus about $1.50 worth of insulated copper wire. I tipped the guy $40, which surprised him. Why not. He was an absolute professional.

All’s well that ends well. If you’re reading this, I send my love. See ya tomorrow, assuming the heat stays on!