Hey there,
With travel restrictions in place, Betty and I were unable to get outta town over the winter break. B-doll however had a month off of school and since she has to leave the dorms, she decided to spend a couple weeks at our Seattle place.
It is cold in Seattle and she asked us how the thermostat operates to heat up the place. We walked through it together as it is the first time we've had to turn it on and it does the trick. For a night.
We get a call from her the next day and chaos has ensued. We have one of those keypad locks. She is sitting there around 10p and all of a sudden hears someone punching in the code to open the front door. Very disconcerting for a girl alone in an unfamiliar space. The guy who lives in the unit below us, and one of the condo board members, who is the handy man about the place, are the intruders. We gave the neighbor our code a while back to help with a weather-proofing project. B-doll doesn't know this and the dudes don't know she is there. After the awkward introductions, they tell B-doll that water is leaking from our place into the unit below and that is when she calls us. The leak is coming from the area around our furnace and not from our water tank. We don't even have a water tank as we replaced it with the tankless kind this summer.
As an aside, we had a water tank in the house we lived in before we moved here, and one winter night, it completely discharged in our basement. There is 60 gallons in one of those things and the water damage it did to that place was severe. It took months to dry it out and the area was never the same again. If you have a water tank, here is a tip that I wish we had received. Sediment inherent in water builds up in the bottom of those things and it is good form to drain it annually, otherwise it may corrode the metal to the point it bursts. There is a spigot at the base where you can hook up a hose to drain it. Had never heard that before the incident and will never forget it. I share this info in hopes of alerting people to properly maintain theirs to avoid such a catastrophe.
That thought was in our heads when we went tankless as we never wanted that to happen again. We were naturally freaked when we get the call. The condo guys, B-doll and us via Facetime are looking at the furnace and see no water. B-doll says she heard some noises coming from the intake vent next to the furnace earlier that day, so we unscrew it and sure enough, there is a pan in there that is full of water that is causing the leak. None of us know why it is there but there had been a lot of rain and snow lately and some suspect it may be coning in from the roof. Another thought was that since this was the first time we had turned on the heat, that it could be related to that. But it is a gas furnace, so how could that be possible? Concurrently, we are remodeling our master bathroom and workers have been there that week, and the condo guys thought they may have been responsible.
We turn off the furnace and ask our contractor to come over the next morning. He figures out that it is the furnace. It seems that those things are hot and water can condense in them, and they all have a water pump to move that water out and that the pump on our furnace is not functioning. Who knew any of that? The pump is behind a vent that is screwed into the wall, so you can't even see the damn thing. I tell you this so you know, but I'm not sure that even if we knew all of those facts that we would have been able to prevent the accident.
Anyway, the contractor has his guy replace the pump the next day and it works. We call B-doll as they are working on it. She had been out during the day and had just come home while the worker is there and we're watching the guy fix it. She goes to the bathroom and says, the toilet is clogged. Flushes it a couple times and no flow. She gets the plunger we have there and she can't get it to budge. More thoughts are now going through our heads.
Our family has a rich tradition of clogging toilets. My great great great grandma, Elizabeth Zeiler famously had a May to September romance with Thomas Crapper, and we have been clogging all manner of toilets ever since. Even though B-doll is adopted, it has woken the ghosts of Imbro's past to celebrate her development into a true member of the family. On the kids roadtrip a couple of weeks back, The Boy shared that she clogged one at the hotel.
To be fair, I don't think it was her this time as these workers are in our house all day, and since they are fixing the main bathroom, they are using the other bathroom. And by using it, I mean destroying it. This summer when they were all in the place working, there were times that I thought a sewage truck had overturned outside our door as these guys diet must be rich in lard. We have her call the board member that helped last night to see if he had a more robust plunger. He comes over and we are still talking to her as he goes at the toilet. We can hear him grunting he is plunging so hard and just when it sounds like he is about to give up, he shouts "I got it!" in joy. We all agree that Babydoll has received a valuable lesson in home ownership.
And we think she got Covid. All four of us Imbros got our boosters within a day of each other this week. Babydoll in Seattle, The Boy in Durham, and Betty and I here in Taiwan. A couple days after hers, I get a call at her 5am, and she is lying in bed sweating and telling me how awful she feels. I tell her to call the doctor in a couple hours and to hydrate. The doctor says to lay low and hydrate and she ends up feeling better. Not sure if she had it, but maybe that, or a reaction to the booster or maybe the flu. Who knows these days?
We were not pushing to get the booster here cause they seemed to have kept it out, but this Omicron, or as I am trying to refer to it...Donkeycron... is another beast and it is slipping through the gates here. A couple of airport workers here, a couple of bank tellers there, and then a big cluster at the Tasty Steakhouse. With the transmissibility of this thing so high, we searched for a place to get it and felt lucky when we found a place downtown that stuck us with the Moderna. We were both a bit squishy the next day, but not too bad. Feels inevitable that it is going to spread here and just pray they don't freak out and close up the town. They are at 70%, which is a good number, but it could be more as there are a ton of folks worried about the blood clotting that a handful of people reported. This culture is big on believing all the scary rumors from their friends. I don't know what their Fox News equivalent is, but am certain there is one. We'll see soon enough.
