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Professor Liddle-Oldman

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There, But Sadly Not Back Again [Jul. 11th, 2009|04:59 pm]
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We have been apartment hunting.

We realized, today, that all adventures begin with the protagonist being thrown out of their lives and into the Night World. This, thus, can be thought of as an adventure. We’re trying to reframe. Unfortunately for that effort, I can’t help but remember the words of a fellow who was certainly propelled out of his home and into a different world, without even any spare handkerchiefs. “Nasty things, adventures, make you late to dinner.”

We looked at one place last night and three today. The first two got an immediate “So Much No” as soon as the rental agent was out of range. The first, the first floor of a two-family in Watertown, wasn’t horrible, but the entire apartment tilted toward the back (“If you dropped something, you’d always know where to look!” suggested my wife in a bright voice), and the stairs downstairs were lethal – high, narrow, and unlighted – and the whole thing was a bit grimy. The first one today was a condo in a newish building, and it would be nice for a single person with no furniture and only two pairs of socks.

We looked at two more that are more possible. One was the first floor of a turn-of-the-century (and not this century); unfortunately revamped by the same sort of people that worked on our current place – that is, poor and tasteless – but with a small bedroom, a big bedroom, and a weird side room that would make a fine office/computer room.

And then the landlady mentioned that there was an apartment open in the building across the street, too.

We had been staring at it earlier. It’s pretty obvious that the original house burned down (turned out it had been the landlady’s grandparent’s) and someone had built the most different house possible. It had the Bauhaus/Le Corbusier stink all over it, but we took a look anyway.

To my astonishment, it dated from the 1970s – I would have guessed 20 years earlier. And, weirdly, it’s so far the frontrunner.

It was designed and built by an engineer, and looks just like that. But the rooms – not bad living room and three good-sized bedrooms – are well-laid-out, roomy, uncluttered, and have 12-foot ceilings with beam and beadboard. We could easily fit a lot of our stuff and a fair bit of he library in. And it’s full of closets.

The bad part is that it was designed by an engineer, and the materials reflect that, too. The outside walls are cinderblock; many of the interior walls are brick; and the remaining ones are some sort of Formica board. The windows are few and tiny. But we might be able to work with this, and once we have bookcases and all the art in, a lot of the walls will be covered. (We have to find a way to hang pictures that doesn’t involve nails, though.

We have an appointment to look at a place near our current house, in a really nice-looking Victorian, and we’re trying to get a line on a different apartment down in Adams Village. After that we’ll confab.

The problem is, a week from today we’re going to New Hampshire – we already paid for the cabin, and we can’t get our money back, so we may as well go – and we need a place to live starting August first. We don’t have a lot of time to work with. I’m thinking that we can possibly move, and then start looking for a more perfect apartment; we shall see.

We still very seriously do not want to move, but at best we’d have to pack up and live somewhere for several months; and at worst, as Janet pointed out (and so far the worst has always happened in this disaster), our current landlord will go bankrupt and lose the house, and banks always evict all the tenants when they repossess. (I have no fraking idea why.) (Though I did point out that we might be able to pick it up at a distressed price at that point.) Moving is certainly the most intelligent choice, looked at dispassionately, but I still purely do not want to.
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When God Closes A Door, He Kicks You In The Groin As Well [Jul. 9th, 2009|04:37 pm]
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I most sincerely do not want to move. There is an excellent chance that we will be forced to move, and I do not want to.

We've started looking at the apartment listings. There are possibilities. It would make sense to move closer to work – we've found possible in Arlington, Waltham, Cambridge, Somerville, and a number of other places I don't want to go to. We have realized that neither of us have ever actually looked for an apartment before, at least not since the Ford Administration.

A few days ago I said that, worst case, we'd never sleep in our home again. Piece by unexpected piece we're approaching worst-case. In some ways it's as though the apartment had been destroyed, in that, one minute we were sitting in the kitchen reading, and the next it was lost to us forever. The fact that it's sitting there intact only makes it more infuriating.

It occurs to me that I've never actually described the place. It's a two-family, on a dense street of one and two-families. The landlord lives on the second floor (in America, the ground floor, ours, is the first floor) and his YA sons live in the built-out third floor, pretty much a third apartment tucked into the attic. The house dates from 1898, like everything else in the neighborhood. Janet's father bought it in the 1950s when her younger brother was born and their previous place got too small; Janet has thus lived here, off and on, for better than 50 years. (The downstairs apartment happened to come available just as she needed an apartment, so she moved in at a family rate.) He sold it to our current landlord (at the worst possible time for half-a-million less than he could have gotten for it a few years later), and we just started paying rent to another name.

I've been thinking, all day, of everything I'll miss if we move to the other side of the city. A lot of them, it turns out, are places to eat – our favorite Mexican place; our favorite Chinese place; the other Chinese place we go when we really need a pupu platter; the lunchroom that has Welsh Rabbit and grits; the lunchroom at the end of our street with the bad omelets and the great home fries; and the Wheelhouse, the diner where I've eaten lunch pretty much every Saturday for thirty something years.

I really hate change, and I really have trouble shifting states. I like where we live, despite the drunken arguments at three in the morning fifteen feet from our bedroom window and the occasional hit-and-run that dents another bit of our car late at night. And I hate the thought that we'll never wake up in our bedroom again, never sit in our kitchen drinking tea and reading the paper, never sit in the front room with my feet on the coffee table watching Jeopardy and shouting the answers to my wife in the next room.

I hate that in one moment we lost our home and the 25 years we've infused into the walls and all of the comforting moments that define our lives.
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A Contraindicated Contraintuitive Contrafactual [Jul. 8th, 2009|02:38 pm]
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Mrs. Professor commented, as we were trying to absorb this latest disturbing update, that in some ways it would have been easier if the damn house had just burned. We'd at least know what state we were in, then. This was such a little fire, but the ramifications keep spreading and overtaking each succeeding layer of our planning. This way, we have hard decisions, no obvious decision tree, and all of our worldly goods to consider as we try to make the decisions.
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'Tis Not So Deep As A Well, Nor So Wide As A Church-Door; But 'Tis Enough, 'Twill Serve. [Jul. 8th, 2009|02:17 pm]
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We just got some bad, disappointing news.

We won't be able to move back to the apartment for another three months, and that after the demolition and repair of most of the interior walls.

Apparently the water infiltration is sufficient that the insurance company wants to pull the walls out for fear of mold; all the walls in the dining room and back hallway, and at least one wall in the bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. I presume the ceilings would go as well.

Even after the rebuilding, there is the question of how well they will rebuild. Currently we have plaster walls, nine foot ceilings, and handsome Victorian woodwork. When the current landlord moved in, they had minor children, and had to remediate the lead paint upstairs. They're also poor. All of the woodwork was just ripped out, and the doors are simply blank holes in the wall now. Would we be left with frameless doors and windows, dropped ceilings, and cheapest-possible materials?

The back bedroom and the front room don't need work; we could box everything and store it in these (sealed) rooms until the work was done. We would then need to find a place to stay for three months. Then we'd need to move back in and re-assemble our lives just as we expect Mrs. Professor to have to be moving our 100-person company into new quarters also.

We need to sit with this for a while, recover somewhat from the hit, and make some decisions. Do we stay, and ride out the storm of inconvenience and destruction, or do we find a new place to live? If we do move – where to? Our neighborhood has gotten surprisingly pricy in the last 20 years. Quincy/Randolph is near many of our friends and services, but a longer commute. Waltham/Watertown is close to work, but otherwise inconvenient – and assumes that these jobs will continue to exist. All of the other towns around here are horse suburbs, with a mean house cost in the millions. Further west, say, Framingham, puts on the Mass Turnpike in the densest traffic jams both ways.

I confess I am angry and saddened to the point of distraction at this development.
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Out Of The Blue [Jul. 7th, 2009|04:05 pm]
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Sunday, we checked out of the Comfort Inn.

We'd spent the long weekend battening down the apartment. I threw away the last of the perishables, as it seems the refrigerator could be off for weeks – after that long, even pickles would die. I scoured it (unhappily; if I'd had a place to bring a lot of this stuff it could have been saved), leaving, in the end, a few bottles of beer, a couple bottles of seltzer, and one or two jello snacks that didn't need to be refrigerated, but just tasted better cold. I opened a couple boxes of baking soda and put one in the fridge and one in the freezer.

We disassembled the computer, and boxed up what little jewelry Janet has, and all of the loose electronics, which are few. We packed two week's worth of clothes. We put a box (a large Lego builder's set box) in the front hall for the landlord to put our mail in. We stopped the paper.

Mrs. Professor does our pills into those four-box-by-seven-day cases. We bought half a dozen more, and she did up meds for the next five weeks. Mrs. Professor is clever.

We drove all the impedimenta to a friend's house and put it in her spare room; the photo albums, the computer and peripherals, the stealables, the meds.

Saturday night, we watched the fireworks at the motel. We'd gone to what the motel ads called a brew pub, but it turned out to be the snack bar for a bowling alley. They did have beer, I'll grant you that. I had fried chicken – and they didn't do the thing of making one piece a fraking wing – and the wife had chicken chupacarbras. The beer was drinkable, though I did notice that the "Nut Brown Ale" was described as "a mixture of porter and lager". That's not even ale, for the love of Bacchus.

Most mornings, the breakfast buffet at the motel had a few guests eating at any one time. Sunday morning, it was packed. The line was out the door and back to the elevators. They must have been full up for the Fourth. We heard English, American Southern , Spanish, French, and Italian. The most startling guest was, essentially, Roy Orbison, hair, sunglasses, and all – save that he sat next to us and spoke Italian to his tablemates.

The girl in the electric blue bustier, two sizes too small, was notable as well.

(One morning the family at the next table was some sort of plain folk – the wife and the inbred little girl wore long cotton dresses, and the husband and the two boys wore dark trousers, Sears short sleeved shirts, and 1957 Boys Regular haircuts. (I could not help but notice that I could have stood next to them and been taken for an uncle.) They left, and a girl wearing such short shorts that I feared she'd bend over, and a guy in a ruffled shirt, took their place. "Ah, and here are the fancy people!", I murmured.)

We ate breakfast, packed the car, and waved good-bye to Morrissey Boulevard and the panoply of working-class tourists. We weren't to check in to the new place for a couple of hours, so we tried to get iced coffee and sit in the shade down near Castle Island, but the whole area was packed. Janet said that in 50 years she'd never seen it that bad. The whole causeway out to Ft. Independence was closed off; the first time we went past there was a bad-tempered lady ranger turning people away; the second time they'd backed up the barrier with a piece of equipment and there were two big scowling guy rangers as well.

We gave up and drove west, sipping on our iced coffee.
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This Is A Public Service Announcement! [Jul. 7th, 2009|02:55 pm]
If I've learned anything from this adventure, it's to get and maintain good smoke detectors, and have a couple of well-maintained extinguishers around.

This weekend, swap out all the batteries, or buy some detectors. Even quite a little fire can really bugger up your living space and your life. Do it. You know I'm right!

(Also, figure out in advance what you'll save if you have that sort of time. We grabbed the checkbook and our wedding album; what else would we have hated to see burning? I'm gong to make a list.)
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The Professor Scares Any Remaining Bejesus Out Of Himself And His Lovely Wife [Jul. 7th, 2009|01:32 pm]
Chronic diseases can bite my shiny metal ass. If only I had a shiny metal ass, and not this meatbag.

I woke about 3:00 A.M., sweaty and trembling. Despite a bedtime blood glucose reading of 200 – somewhat high – I was having a hypoglycemic reaction. I got up and tested, and my bg was 28. "Actionable" begins at 80. This number is similar to the one the paramedics found when my wife had to call 911 last year.

Luckily, we had gone shopping yesterday evening, so my wife fed me yogurt and peanut butter crackers and fudge. To add to the excitement, I'd been having a vivid dream, in which I'd worked out that I was having a reaction, and I must have been talking to my wife about it in the dream. I get aphasic, unable to remember words, at the best of times, and low blood sugar doesn't help. I kept insisting that she refer to the previous conversation ("The story! What's the story!?), and got frustrated when she didn't twig.

To the conversation we'd been having in my dream.

She was quite alarmed for me for a bit.

I ate, and read a few minutes (being rational again), and tested again; I was up to 80. I went back to bed and woke with a high bg number, but I expected that.

All the while, in front of me, was a hotel-provided magazine with an article title "Ooops! How to learn life lessons from out mistakes." I think the life lesson here is, do not drink anything after supper.. I'd had an ounce of bourbon around 9:30, and that's a commonality with my previous disaster.

Lord bless and keep my wonderful wife. Chronic diseases can bite my ass
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Meanwhile, In Another Part Of The Forest [Jul. 2nd, 2009|05:05 pm]
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I had an appointment this morning with my diabetes doctor. The news, to my astonishment, was largely good. My blood pressure was, hmmm, 132/83; my weight is steady; and my A1C was down! It's at 7.8, which still needs work, but that's in the right direction.

Apparently, motels being boring, we're going to bed early, so I'm taking my bedtime insulin on time, so my morning numbers are good. (~120) Who'd have thought it!

It was so dark and misty and rainy at 9:00 I felt like we were at the bottom of an aquarium. As I said to a confused man huddled under his umbrella as I dashed in to the hospital, "Summer would only make us soft!"

It so happened that we drove over Meetinghouse Hill, which is where the first This Old House was filmed. There was a great deal funny about that – the crew going through the house with the inspector, saying "We were hoping to save that", and "That still looks good…", and the inspector responding "Nah, it's all shot. All shot. Just tear it right out."

Not to mention, when they took out the old furnace, the foreman gave the word and his crew just pushed it over. Fanning the thick dust away from his face, he assured the PBS crew "Don't worry about that, it's just the asbestos."

So I'm almost healthy. I can't answer for the furnace guys.
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Wire Paladin – San Francisco [Jul. 2nd, 2009|04:46 pm]
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We've made adjustments.

Apparently the city has more than one wiring inspector, but they never go into each other's territories. Ours is gone missing, and there's nothing to be done about it

We've decided to proceed on the assumption that we won't be able to get back into the house until August. I had meant to mention – we'll be in New Hampshire for the last two weeks in July, leaving the 18th. I'll be incommunicado. And on the porch. Mrs. P, as usual, has come up with an elegant and workable solution.

Turns out there's such a thing as "extended-stay hotels", with kitchenettes and so forth. There's a couple in Waltham and a brand new one in Lexington, just up the road from us. The Lexington one looks a little nicer on the screen, and she was able to negotiate a favorable rate. We'll stay in the current motel until Sunday and then move, and stay there until the 18, and go to NH.

We'll be packing up anything vaguely valuable – the computer tower, the wife's jewelry (not that she's a walking bazaar of dangles), the cameras we're not bringing with us. A friend has agreed to store everything. It's trash night tonight, so we'll swing past the house and put out the refrigerator contents I already bundled up, round up the trash, and discard the stuff from the fridge I thought we could salvage – onions, carrots, frozen bacon, butter. All that'll be left will be a couple lonely bottles of beer.

The landlord's son said that they'll be in and out all the time, so they can take in the mail and keep an eye on our part of the house too. We'll just have to stop the paper until August.

Nothing's simple, even if you really wish it would be.
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The Professor Expresses Dissatisfaction With Municipal Services [Jul. 2nd, 2009|11:33 am]
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Fuck me sideways.

It appears that one of the city inspectors is "out of town" until the 13th (it's the second now), so it'll be a week and a half before anyone even looks at the house. We are taken aback. We are thrown into a quandary.

We could stay in the motel, but that's going to start to run into money. We could accept one or another offer of crash space, but that would be weird and uncomfortable. I seriously don't want to spend a week at my mother's, and neither one of us has any other relatives with a room. (Granted, my sister runs a B&B, but those rooms will already be full.) A co-worker has offered to lend us her condo and stay with her grown daughter, but that'd be weird for a week and a half, too.

Bugger.

In fact, this morning we were following a car with the license 61 X POO. I commented that that was a lot of poo. So, 61X poo indeed, and 61X Long at that.

Bugger bugger.
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Don't Try Pretending You've Somewhere Else To Go [Jul. 1st, 2009|03:57 pm]
We have some more information! (If you don't know "Information about what?", you're not staying current with the panoply of extemporania which is my life, and need to go back a couple entries!)

Mrs. Professor made some phone calls, and our contact (whose name is Geo) called back. The good news is, there doesn't seem to be any serious problems that would keep us out of the apartment, and the insurance adjuster is specifically trying to champion that outcome. The more awkward news is, it'll be Monday at the earliest. (This is Wednesday.)

The electricians put in a whole new service; basically a bigger pipe. However, most of the wiring is just what was already in the walls, and their supervisor has to sign off on the interface, and then a city electrical inspector has to sign off. (Despite the fact that the house next door went through a complete gut-and-rehab, and never even pulled a permit, much less saw any inspectors.) Ultimately, it's the Fire Department, with the city, who re-certifies the space and allows the power to be turned back on. And Friday is a holiday.

Mrs. P called the motel (I was going to do it when we got back, really!) and booked us through the weekend. They've knocked the rate down, whether because of the extended stay or my sad, sad story of why we were there, I don't know. We're all set, for a given value of "set". Of course, that means we're spending a weekend in a motel – maybe we can go tourist!

Geo also said that they weren't cashing our rent check, as we weren't actually in tenancy. Janet told him sharply to cash the damn thing, they could certainly use the liquid cash. We can negotiate a pro-rated repayment out of future month's rents. You have to admire a landlord with principles.

So, we hope Monday or Tuesday we can get back to our real lives, for a given value of "back". At that point I can check and see if the computer got wet, or if we covered it in time. Let's hope it doesn't start another fire!
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Good-Bye Means Nothing If It's All For Show [Jul. 1st, 2009|11:48 am]
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Day Three of this unfolding hostage crisis!

We went by the house again last night to get more clothes; we'd been wildly optimistic when we packed the first time. The water remediation guys had been at work, and so had the emergency electrician. There are work lights strung all over the apartment, largely hung from the lattices of the suspended ceilings in the bathroom, dining room, and kitchen (all of whom have had plaster failures in the past), and giant industrial dehumidifiers parked, but not currently running.

The water remediation guys had also taken all of the soggy hung tiles away, which is a relief; they were getting stinky. I had planned to pull them down and chuck them Friday, trash day, but now I don't have to. The plaster does look damp in places – I have no idea if it'll dry, or if they'll have to replace it. (I sincerely hope for no destruction and construction in our space.)

In fact, I sincerely hope we'll be able to get back in at all. All of our information is being transmitted through a little boy. Well, OK, he's a college graduate, and smart, and supportive – he told us that they've told the adjusters that they want us back in the apartment, and this is not a handy time to turn it or take it themselves. But he's still young, and doesn't think as programmatically as Mrs. Professor does. He doesn't ask things like, who makes the decisions, and when will they be made?

Mrs. P asked him to find out who’s in charge and get us that phone number, which makes more sense.

We're feeling quite disconnected and spacey. We feel that if we knew what was happening, it'd be better -- can we move back in, and, if so, when? This must be absolutely devastating and hallucinatory for the landlord and his family, of course; we're also trying to cause them as little additional aggravation as possible.

I have an appointment at the Joslin tomorrow morning (diabetes doctor); we're trying to decide whether to postpone it. My records are sitting on the kitchen table, so if we keep it, we'll have to go by again tonight and rescue them. Eventually, we'll have everything moved to the motel. (Actually, we also brought our laundry back and threw it in the appropriate hampers when we got more underwear; being there and not being there is adding to the surreal atmosphere.)

I spoke to the desk clerk and extended our stay for another couple of days. It turns out that the landlord's insurance will cover our "emergency relocation expenses" up to $750, so we have a couple more days to play with before it starts to cost us real money.

To end on an amusing note, it's Inappropriate Quotations Time! The breakfast buffet has a terribly clever waffle maker; put in the pre-measured batter, close and rotate (no, I don't know why) the griddle, and wait two minutes and ten seconds. There's a sign by the machine that reads, Please spray Pam on "the top and the bottom" of the waffle maker before using!. Once again, instead of emphasizing they both need spraying, they've cast doubt on whether the griddle has a top, or a bottom, or is just an existential concept in an empty universe. Which would not contain syrup. Which would be sad!
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An Eary Tale! [Jun. 30th, 2009|04:11 pm]
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I just ate some artichokes. Funny story, that.

(Actually, more than one. My supermarket has promo signs over the artichokes which read "Tear off the leaves and ear the fleshy end". They've had the same signs up for a couple of years now, each season. If they tried to ear the thorned end, they'd fix the damn signs quickly enough!)

When I went shopping Sunday I'd bought half-a-dozen artichokes. As I have a bad habit of leaving them in the fridge for a week or two, I prepared and boiled them immediately. They were draining in a colander in the sink when we fled the building. When we went back in to pack for our refugee flight, I actually put them in a plastic bag and grabbed a fresh jar of Russian dressing to take along. Somehow, with all that was in jeopardy, I couldn't turn my back on $5 worth of vegetables.

In the event, I'd left them in the water too long (having gotten distracted by Meet The Robinsons), and they were a trifle over-done, but I still saved them from the disaster.

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=

Several people have commented on how calmly I'm taking this. I thought about it this afternoon. We're doing what we can do, which isn't much. I can be depressed and anxious and dramatic, or I can Spock it out. Spocking has stood me in good stead many times in the past, and I think it's a good choice here. Keep my head, check for developments, and Don't Panic.
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The Roof! The Roof! The Roof Is On Fire! [Jun. 30th, 2009|01:23 pm]
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First of all, thank you everyone for all of the supportive and sympathetic responses! I sincerely hope I don't have to avail myself of anyone's very kind offers of help and succor, but it's nice having them.

My mother – who takes in boarders – has offered us the back bedroom if we need it. I sincerely hope it doesn't come to that, either!

Still at the motel, for at least one more night. When I told the desk we'd be staying an extra day, they told me the room wasn't available, but of course they shuffled assignments and freed it up for us. Mrs. Professor, having braved fire, flood, and homelessness, had a broken-spring moment at the no-room-at-the-inn complication (recovering, of course, quickly). I probably should have grabbed a bottle of vodka as well as clean underpants when we left.

We went to the house this morning before work and cleaned out the refrigerator. I had thought, yesterday, that it had begun to smell a trifle funk-ish (remember, the power was shut off Sunday night), but that's the wet ceiling tiles in the dining room. The fridge was actually still cool, and the stuff in the freezer still sort of frozen. We chucked everything, still, sadly, but at least the suspicious chops, thrown in the freezer on the last possible day, are gone. As well as a couple hundred dollars of meat and yogurt and salad dressings…

It is possible that some of it would be salvageable – but would you trust it? I did save a couple pounds of frozen bacon, figuring that it was at least cured, and frozen. If the power goes back on in time, it might be useable.

The landlord's apartment – the second and third floors – may have to be gutted for mold. My thought is that it's all horsehair plaster, not wallboard, and might be savable; maybe not. They might not be able to move back in for months. We have no idea about our place yet – the water remediation guy didn't get scary readings, and he did get sees-a-ghost expressions from his meter upstairs.

Supposedly, an electrician and inspector are going in today. We may be able to move back in tomorrow, which would be nice. (On the other end of that spectrum, we'll never sleep there again. I'm not contemplating that for now, thanks.) We are Watchfully Waiting.

At breakfast today, Janet pointed out that it'd been less than 36 hours since the alarm was raised. It feels like days. Time is flexible in this place!

Also at breakfast, I pointed out that we're functioning as a mutually supportive and co-operative couple, rather than letting the strain fray us. Apparently we really are committed to each other in mutual respect and affection. Nice to know!

We took, from the house, more clean underwear and shirts, all my insulins (to put in Janet's office refrigerator), and a few groceries (still-cool yogurt, apples, cheese, and humus) we thought we could trust. I still threw out a couple of dozen yogurts – I'd just stocked up – as they'd been warmish for over a day and we weren't sure of them. I changed into clean jeans. It's, frankly, surreal, visiting and working in an apparently unchanged space, so familiar and yet now alien. We locked up and came to work.

More despatches once we can lay telegraph wire to the front!
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Luke! Luke! The Barn! The Barn! [Jun. 29th, 2009|11:43 am]
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We are – temporarily – homeless. We had a house fire last night.

We were sitting at the kitchen table about 10:30, reading, when someone began to pound on the door. I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter, but then they began to shout that there was a fire. We threw some necessities into our bags – insulin and meds and the books we'd been reading – and hurried outside. I took a moment to throw my photo albums into the trunk of the car first; I could just begin to smell burning insulation.

One of the sons of the landlord told me it was an electrical fire above the ceiling of the built-out attic of the nineteenth century two-family. They had smelt it, traced it, sensibly decided it was already beyond them, called 911 and warned us.

There are advantages to urban density. The fire department arrived, in force, about two minutes later. Guys ran a hose in, and a ladder deposited two guys on the roof. They were impressively calm and businesslike and competent. A friend from down the street arrived to be supportive, and everyone else on the block turned out to spectate.

It's surprising upsetting to smell that burning house smell from your own house. It was also surreal, as our lights were still on, and I could see into our perfectly normal looking apartment. I was hopeful, though, as the men were opening windows from the top and the skylights, rather than breaking them out, and the two men with the Come To Jesus saw on the roof didn't fire it up to cut ventilation holes.

One of the guys, who saw me peering into the living room, told me that they were trying to use a minimum of water, which was also reassuring. The whole thing was pretty much over in less than an hour. A fireman walked us into the apartment so we could secure it and grab our toothbrushes. Water was dripping out of the ceiling near the outside of the dining room – which is unfortunately where the computer and its peripherals live – but the friend and I cleared the stuff under the drip and put plastic bags on the equipment. (The power had been shut off, and we were working by flashlight.)

The friend offered a mattress on her floor, but I demurred, and we went to a motel down on Morrissey Boulevard. It was generous of her, but I wanted our privacy to freak out in, and get up without worrying about seeing someone in their underwear.

A Mrs. Professor story. She'd already written the July rent check and had it in an envelope for delivery on the first. As we were all standing outside, she gave it to the landlord, saying "You may well need this right now". Instead of being angry at him, or discussing recompense, or threatening lawsuits, she did what she could to help. She just blinked when I pointed this out this morning – of course she'd been nice, and helpful. Mrs. Professor is, you will have twigged by now, a lovely person.

We slept fitfully. In the morning we at least had showers with plenty of water pressure and hot water, ate a perfectly nice breakfast at the free buffet, and went past the house to check on progress.

Our landlord, the poor man, was on the porch, waiting, I think, for his insurance guy. (His English is weak and my Spanish is nonexistent, and he stammers.) He apologized several times, I sympathized several times, and we took a look at my apartment. For a house that's had a fire, we got off very lightly. The hung ceiling in the dining room is toast – soggy toast – and I suspect whatever's left of the plaster above it is dead as well. Perhaps the insurance will cover repairing it, at long last. I'm a bit concerned about mold. The rug is damp, but it's synthetic, and it'll dry. Everything else seemed untouched. I took a towel and wiped off the table that had been dripped on, grabbed a couple of incidentals we'd forgotten in the scramble the previous night, and we came to work.

Well, where the hell else were we going to go?

Tonight, we'll go over and throw out everything in the refrigerator. (There was a puddle in front of it, but I didn't want to bother with it just then.) Unless they have the power up, we'll spend another night in the motel. (We may anyway; we've already incurred another night's charge.) (And the landlord said his insurance ought to cover it. He'd already offered to cover it himself.) By tomorrow, we hope, the landlord will get a licensed electrician and a city inspector to go in and certify the electrical system (and, I would imagine, disconnect the burney part.) Further news as it happens.
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They're Giving You A Number, And Taking Away Your Name [Jun. 27th, 2009|04:58 pm]
The scanner is working! And, to prove it, I present my lovely bride and her Secret Service Agent ... of love.




[ed] how odd -- it's fuzzy, but if you click through, it's clearer.
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State Of The State Of The Professor [Jun. 27th, 2009|03:33 pm]
Let me be clear. When I said, yesterday, So Micheal Jackson, poor man, has abruptly dropped dead, and I'm weirdly dizzy, I meant, specifically, that I was feeling ill and staggering about, and the room was spinning, and even though Micheal Jackson was having a bad day himself, my own unexplained symptoms were concerning me more than his were, despite the inequality of their severity. I was not expressing any opinion on the unfortunate singer, his legacy, his private life, or his scandals.

Turns out there's a virus going about -- several people at work have had or know someone who has had the very same symptoms. (Roughly those of three quick vodkas and then spinning about for a while). I spent a quiet night and felt better in the morning -- not well, but not worried that I was going to fall over, either. I delayed my usual grocery shopping to tomorrow (church is out for the summer, so I don't even have to plan around that, and it's the future, so everything is open.) (Except for the wine-and-beer aisles at the Stop 'n' Shop, which, in the very lasat vestiges of the blue laws, are fenced off on Sundays from midnight to noon.)

I toodled off to the lunchroom at the head of my street and had french toast (and why French? Something else to research) and coffee, and now I'm going to see if the scanner will talk to the rebuilt computer or if it deranges it again.

If I go silent, you'll know the answer!
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Perspective [Jun. 26th, 2009|12:13 pm]
So Micheal Jackson, poor man, has abruptly dropped dead, and I'm weirdly dizzy. Guess which is worrying me more.
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We Will All Go Together When We Go; All Suffused With An Incandescent Glow [Jun. 25th, 2009|09:27 pm]
The dominant siding in my neighborhood is vinyl, usually vinyl in a color often associated with crystal mints. It’s cheap, it lasts, and (I suspect) it appeals to those who want to destroy any vestige of visual appeal left.

When these houses burn, the vinyl siding melts. If it’s a good conflagration, it’ll peel all of the siding from the houses on either side. This exposes whatever was the previous siding – rotten clapboards, decaying asphalt, cracked asbestos. It’s a little glimpse into the past.

We’re a couple of miles, here, from the center of the city, or, Ground Zero, if you will. I’m too lazy to go look up how long it would take, but if the balloon ever does go up, we have several seconds between the flash, which chars wood and melts eyeballs, and the edge of the blast, which will reduce the entirety of Dorchester to shattered lumber and screaming casualties and the beginning of the firestorm, which will, if nothing else, quiet all the screaming.

But, for two or three seconds, between the beginning of the Last War and it’s end, at least for us, it’ll be 1964 again, as the last thirty years of bad decisions simply slump away in the blistering and pitiless light.
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Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head: An Adventure In Time [Jun. 25th, 2009|03:33 pm]
As anyone within broadcast distance of my signal knows, June in Boston has been impressively cool and rainy. I won't gloat – much – but this reminds me of the summer of '68.

The summer of 1968 rained. It rained a lot. I was living in a tent at one side of a hay field at the time, and we got wet. In fact, after a while they started making trips into town (Winchendon) every few days just to run our sleeping bags through dryers.

The tent had no floor. (The floors had long since worn out.) It was on a platform, but if the wall wasn't positioned right that just sluiced rain across the floor and around our moldering possessions. I wore a WWII field jacket (later stolen and sold for cigarettes) most of the summer, often with a garbage bag under it. Sartorially, our theme was "I have mildew where you don't want to know".

That was also the summer of the fires.

First, I think, the Cabin In The Sky went. I remember it as the Fourth of July night. Someone was trying to pour fuel from one Coleman lantern to another – while it was lit – and spilled. Whoops! The log cabin was reduced to a few charred logs. (One friend, looking up at the blaze halfway up the mountain, could only think, "But that was a new nickel bag!" Don't play with matches, kids!)

It made a good story, though, as the road up the mountain was terrible. Usually the only vehicle that could make it up was our Korean War surplus jeep, and that with some maneuvering. One of the maintenance guys – one of the competent ones – actually sort of built the road with a backhoe in front of the fire truck as it went up. It got there, but not really in time to do much.

That got [info]natevw added to my unit; his bunk had been in the destroyed building.

Then – then it got interesting. Someone burned the dining hall down.

Someone – at this late date, I have no idea what his name might have been – decided that country living was no longer for him, broke into the dining hall late one night, upended a trash can onto the stove, lit the stove, and walked away. Destruction was absolute. The only thing left the next morning was the bathroom floor (I imagine the toilet burst and kept it damp), the mainbeam, and the fireplace. Every other scrap of the structure was gone. It so happened that the county line between Cheshire and Hillsborough ran right through the hall, and the story we heard later was that the two country fire departments had a grand fight arguing over whose responsibility and territory it was.

Did I mention that the destruction was complete?

The camp found a small, clapped-out trailer and rigged it as a field kitchen. They built makeshift tables and benches under a jerryrigged tarp. For the rest of the summer, we took all our meals in the open air, huddled away from the rain, feeling as though we were pausing in some disastrous retreat to be issued a meal before moving on. It was great. It was suffused with Romanticism. It was also evident that we did, in fact, have to live like a refugee.

I find it difficult to be concerned over a week or two of anomalous weather, so long as I have a roof that isn't canvas, a bed that isn't damp, and meals that aren't improvised. But, you know, if I were back in ragged soggy BDUs eating A rations in the rain, I bet I could still get an amusing narrative out of it.
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