Hot Enough For Ya?

Hello World,

Happy Veterans Day! This is about half a red-letter day, compared to how it used to be, with about half of the banks closed, half of the schools closed, half of the businesses closed - and the other half, wondering what all the fuss is about. It's also Bill's birthday, and we both took the day off from work, and it turned out to be an absolutely beautiful day to be outside and enjoy the glorious weather. Unfortunately, it was not such a great day to spend hanging around the house, as it was no holiday for the porch contractors, who showed up early and spent the whole day pounding and sawing, banging and drilling, and stamping about up and down ladders, until you just about couldn't hear yourself think. (And which we all know, is already hard enough on my two poor addled brain cells any more - which I have renamed Dickens and Fenster for the occasion - until I felt like nothing so much as that old Anacin commercial with the hammers in the head, which I probably hadn't thought about in 40 years.) And for the numerologists out there, it was another very special day, where we could observe and be part of a unique moment in time when the clocks struck 11:11:11 on 11/11/11, which certainly made it a holiday for the rest of the numbers, by golly.

Of course, last weekend we finally reached the point when we get to switch back over from Daylight Saving Time, so all of you nocturnal wastrels out there can go right back to wasting all the daylight that you want once again with impunity. In fact, we should probably call this short period of the year the Daylight Wasting Time System, or DWTS, and the heck with Dancing With The Stars, is what I say. Many of us were glad for a chance to "fall back" and gain an extra hour to enjoy in any way that we liked, and it didn't even cause all that great havoc on Sunday morning, with hordes of people showing up at church at the wrong time. Now as the daylight shifts back earlier, it's nice that it's a bit lighter in the mornings, but driving home in the dark is a stone cold drag, and that's no joke. After all, if it was a joke, "The Comedy Rule of Three" would apply, and we'd have the time changing three times a year instead of twice, and the poor daylight wouldn't know if it was being saved or wasted or dancing with the stars, for heaven's sake.

Speaking of jokes, last week was really one for the record books, but for those of us who lived through it, it's going to take a while before we care to laugh about it, I can tell you that. Of course, everyone knows that the ancient rattletrap of a flea-bag where I work is so antiquated that it pre-dates the invention of elevators, and is constructed entirely of mud and straw. It features an old steam heat system to provide heat and hot water, but without any way to regulate it, so once the heat is turned on, the building is many hundreds of degrees too hot to work in, and everyone spends the entire winter with their windows wide open and their air conditioners running at full tilt, just to ward off some of the intense heat radiating from the walls. So it was totally unexpected when the boiler developed a valve problem, and there was literally no heat in the whole building for an entire week, for the first time since I've been there, and to say that it was uncharacteristic for this building would be an understatement of epic proportion. I don't mind saying that in the beginning, people rejoiced (and I was certainly one of them) because it finally wasn't too hot for a change, and people made the best of it by wearing coats and sweaters, and toughing it out in a grim spirit of misery loves company. But it turned into a long cold week, and one day was so uncomfortably frosty that they actually sent us home, which is just about unheard of in healthcare, I can tell you that. (Especially since they were nice and toasty in the main hospital building, where it was probably great sport for them to watch us out their windows, as we huddled outside in the sun in a vain effort to warm up before braving the icy chill in our offices once again.) So while it was interesting for it to be too cold instead of too hot, it really was a textbook example of "too much of a good thing," until even the diehards like me were ready to call it quits.

Meanwhile, alert readers may remember that this was the exact same week that the asbestos team dismantled our furnace at home, while the plumbers didn't install the new furnace until the following week, so guess what - there was also no heat at home, during the very same long cold week, and I'm sure it goes without saying, thanks oh so very much not. All week, the cats were doubled up on afghans, we were bundled up in long johns, and the electric blankets and portable heaters were working overtime, I can assure you. It was too cold in the kitchen to cook, so we ate out a lot, and you can bet that we asked for the warmest seats that they had in the place, that's for sure. Some days, it was so cold in the house that it was actually warmer outside, which I personally thought was just adding insult to injury, and made me wish for a Climate Control Board that a person could complain to. It really was an unprecedented and coincidental double-whammy that I never would have expected in my life, that there would be no heat at home and no heat at work in exactly the same time period, and completely out of the blue, where usually the heat is the least of our problems. I said to Bill that you know things are completely upside-down when the warmest place I go all week is church, which has always been so chilly that everyone routinely wears their coats through the whole service, and people cluster around the coffee urn downstairs for warmth. I have to tell you that as much as I complain about the heat, I was glad when the Engineering department fixed the boiler valve at work, and even more delighted when the plumbers finally finished hooking up our new furnace at home, and it will take a long time before I lose the thrill of those wonderfully balmy BTU's wafting all over me, I can tell you that. Now I can save my long johns for church, where they belong.

And while we're on the topic of the long and short of it, we all received a broadcast email at work to let us know about events around our friendly neighborhood health system, which encompasses four separate institutions in two cities, with thousands of employees and numerous buildings on their sprawling campuses. This particular notice was about the nursing school, which is named for its benefactor, the estimable Dorothea Hapsburg, where the students had created an awareness program for health issues facing the community. Unfortunately, it all ran aground on the rocky shoals of a well-known email drawback, which is the size limitation of the email subject line - so that what we all saw in our Inbox was a memo with this startling subject:

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Happenings! Hapsburg Promotes Breast Cancer and Domestic Violence

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..... and that was where it stopped. It was the "Awareness" part of it that didn't make the cut, as it ran out of room in the field that was allotted to it, and was swallowed up in the rampaging bits and bytes of the hospital network. In their defense, the complete title was actually included in the email itself, and showed up big as life if anyone took the time to print the message out on paper, so it wasn't that they left the word off like a bunch of incompetent illiterates or anything. But it certainly got our attention on Wednesday morning, in spite of the frigid conditions at the time, and for all the wrong reasons, I don't mind saying. In fact, it's exactly the kind of thing I would expect out of Dickens and Fenster, but before I can let them use the computer, I'm going to have to get those hammers away from them.

Elle