Florida-ho!
Jan. 29th, 2010 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateSo, we have finally got heat. I will not bore you with the further details of the pellet stove fiasco, except to say that what with one thing and another, it didn't get hooked up properly until last night and then instead of producing large quantities of heat as advertised, it in fact produced very small quantities of heat while smelling up the house like the inside of a chimney, burning highly inefficiently, and spitting a quarter of its pellets outside the burn box. This morning, there were phone calls which resulted, with a great deal of luck, in two excellent guys who came out and installed another gas furnace, which after some other difficulties that we won't get into, is now producing heat. Every time I look over at the thermometer, it's gone up another half degree or so.
However, the metaphor for the last eight days is as follows: You are someplace cold, say, Minnesota, and it's cold out so you decide to go to Florida for the winter, rather than freeze. (Never mind that, adequate heating provided, I'd rather winter in Minnesota than Florida. This is beside the point.) Unfortunately, you end up waiting around in airports for a couple days (perhaps all the flights south are booked?) until you're considering taking the train. Unfortunately, Amtrak is about three weeks behind schedule, so the next time they'd be able to get you to Florida would be in March. You could always charter a private jet as early as Monday, but you can't afford to do that because you'll need some money left over once you get to Florida.
After about a week of cancelled flights and delays and bizarre plane failures (and in the mean time, you've been getting colder and colder...) you finally get on a flight and instead of going to Florida, it takes you to Greenland where you can barely land because it's in the middle of a snowstorm. (Or possibly Iceland, with volcano fumes?) This is not helpful, and if you're really lucky you've actually got your passport so they'll let you out of the airport for the night so you can complain at the embassy only to discover that they haven't got one in Greenland. At any rate, a friendly ticket agent takes pity on you as you are now in tears from stress and frustration and trying not to yell at your traveling companions, and gets you on the first flight back to the US, which is actually going someplace warm. Possibly it's to Texas or New Mexico, but at this point you don't really care so long as it's warm and you can leave the damn airport. And then the flight takes off, and half-way across the Atlantic there's some sort of minor electrical problem with the plane, and you have to spend the rest of the flight breathing through the oxygen masks. And of course even once you get there, there's still the problem of whether you'll be able to get any of your money back from the people who took you Greenland.
So, yes, my apologies to all of you (you mostly don't know who you are, though) whose e-mails and lj entries I've been failing to respond to in the last few days.
However, the metaphor for the last eight days is as follows: You are someplace cold, say, Minnesota, and it's cold out so you decide to go to Florida for the winter, rather than freeze. (Never mind that, adequate heating provided, I'd rather winter in Minnesota than Florida. This is beside the point.) Unfortunately, you end up waiting around in airports for a couple days (perhaps all the flights south are booked?) until you're considering taking the train. Unfortunately, Amtrak is about three weeks behind schedule, so the next time they'd be able to get you to Florida would be in March. You could always charter a private jet as early as Monday, but you can't afford to do that because you'll need some money left over once you get to Florida.
After about a week of cancelled flights and delays and bizarre plane failures (and in the mean time, you've been getting colder and colder...) you finally get on a flight and instead of going to Florida, it takes you to Greenland where you can barely land because it's in the middle of a snowstorm. (Or possibly Iceland, with volcano fumes?) This is not helpful, and if you're really lucky you've actually got your passport so they'll let you out of the airport for the night so you can complain at the embassy only to discover that they haven't got one in Greenland. At any rate, a friendly ticket agent takes pity on you as you are now in tears from stress and frustration and trying not to yell at your traveling companions, and gets you on the first flight back to the US, which is actually going someplace warm. Possibly it's to Texas or New Mexico, but at this point you don't really care so long as it's warm and you can leave the damn airport. And then the flight takes off, and half-way across the Atlantic there's some sort of minor electrical problem with the plane, and you have to spend the rest of the flight breathing through the oxygen masks. And of course even once you get there, there's still the problem of whether you'll be able to get any of your money back from the people who took you Greenland.
So, yes, my apologies to all of you (you mostly don't know who you are, though) whose e-mails and lj entries I've been failing to respond to in the last few days.