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Gryphonadmin
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Feb-24-21, 00:44 AM (EDT)
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"somewhat less epic venting"
 
   LAST EDITED ON Feb-24-21 AT 00:45 AM (EST)
 
This sequence of misfortunes is shorter than December's, at least, so there's that.

First, and this item's connection to the rest will only become apparent at the end, I missed class last Thursday through no fault of my own. The university's single-sign-on system declined to let me log into any of the school's systems, including the online classroom where the link to the Zoom conference lives. Thinking my account might have been compromised, I ran the password reset tool, to no apparent avail. Calling the IT help desk turned up the interesting information, which might profitably have been mentioned on the password reset tool's page, that changing your password that way disables your account for two hours while everything propagates.

Class is two hours long.

So that's sort of the ultimate "dog ate my homework" story for the digital age, but it does at least have the virtue of being true. Not knowing what else to do, I wrote up some notes on the chapter of the reading I was supposed to have presented on and emailed them to the professor, figuring at least he would know I'd read it and hadn't ducked the class because I wasn't prepared. He responded the next day that the session had run long, and he'd have me present next week (that is, this week, now).

Anyway, that was annoying, but it pales in comparison to what happened next.

So. Let me set the scene. It's Saturday afternoon in the Fortress of Solitude, and I'm sitting in the kitchen making a pizza when it dawns on me that I'm hearing something I don't normally hear in there. You know that feeling when it's something non-obvious, like a smoke detector doing the dying-battery chirp, and it takes you a while to consciously realize it's happening? That.

I stop what I'm doing and listen more closely. There it is again. And again. Every few minutes, something somewhere in the kitchen is making a mechanical click, like a relay tripping, followed by about ten seconds of that distinctive hum an electric motor makes when it's trying to start, but can't, and then another, louder click. Thirty or so seconds of silence, and then it happens again.

My immediate thought is that something's gone wrong with the water cooler. It's a cheap unit I bought at the wholesale club a few years ago, and its predecessor only lasted about this long before failing. So I unplug it and wait. ... Nope. Still happening. It's not the water cooler. The stove? There's nothing in there that should be doing that. The only motor is for the convection mode fan, and I'm not using that right now--almost never use it, in fact.

The fridge? No, it's running. Can't be the fridge... the hell is going on?

I fret about it for a while, but don't come to a conclusion. My tinnitus makes it hard to hear the direction of an intermittent sound like that, so I can't tell much besides that whatever's making the noise is in the kitchen, and I've already ruled out everything that I think could be making it.

You've probably figured it out already. It's the fridge. The circ fan is running, but the compressor is failing to start.

I didn't figure it out until Sunday morning, when I went to get the day's first beverage and found it, and everything else in the refrigerator, warm.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but you can't get a refrigerator repaired on a basis of time not measured in weeks nowadays, and acquiring an emergency replacement refrigerator on a Sunday afternoon in rural Maine, with a snowstorm in the immediate forecast, when you are not, yourself, physically capable of wrangling a refrigerator, is a) a non-trivial task and b) really stressful.

After a great many phone calls and visits to balky websites (Big Retail was apparently suffering a widespread DDOS attack that afternoon, I've since found out!), I eventually ended up buying a fridge from (big home improvement store that isn't the orange one). I had certain constraints to work with, principal among them: since the only help I was going to get bringing it into the house was my 69-year-old father with his asthma and chronic foot problems, it had to weigh as close as possible to 150 pounds or less. That ruled out anything as high-capacity or feature-rich as the one I was replacing--no side-by-sides or French-door units here, nothing with an in-door ice dispenser. The one I ended up with is better than its predecessor at one and only one thing, but since that one thing is "keeping things cold inside it," well...

Just purchasing said fridge turned out to be a mess, because the store didn't HAVE the one the website originally sold me, and arranging a suitable replacement without paying more for it required considerable back-and-forth and waiting for callbacks after management consultation. By the time we got it sorted out, Dad declared it too late in the day for him to pick it up and bring it here; he would only go get it and take it home with him (as he lives considerably closer to the city where the big stores are than I do), then bring it the rest of the way and install it on Monday.

Of course it was the right call; we would never have been able to accomplish anything other than breaking things, hurting ourselves, and falling out if we had attempted it that evening. Still, when you've got a fridge full of food on the verge of rotting, the last thing you want to hear is "mañana, mañana," you know? I was not best pleased. I ended up dragging everything out onto the porch, where it wasn't cold enough for things to stay frozen (let alone refreeze), but everything would at least stay fridge-level cool. I'd just have to come up with a plan for the thawed meat later, and throw out anything that had to stay frozen until cooked (e.g., frozen pizzas).

Once I got all that done, I was too drained and pissed off to consider cooking, so I decided to go to (popular fast-food restaurant) and get some dinner, then call it a day. I got into the truck and discovered I'd been so out of sorts I left the house without my keys, which also meant I'd locked myself out.

Fortunately, I live next door to my mother, who has a spare key to both my house and the truck, so I called her. She took a while to find them and get suited up to bring them out, and while I was waiting I started shivering violently. I assumed it was because I was cold. It's February, after all, and I was sitting in an unheated pickup.

Spoiler: I wasn't cold, I was, and remain, ill. I have no idea what with. Somehow, despite living like a paranoid, agoraphobic bubble boy for the past year, I've managed to contract what the NP at my doctor's office thinks is a viral infection (although she does not currently believe it is THE Virus). It has the following symptoms:

- a fever that isn't really super-high, but comes with really strong chills, gets higher at night, and brings along with it the usual side effects of body aches and headache; and
- ... that's it. There are no other symptoms. No cough, no nasal congestion, no digestive irregularities (beyond the ones I already have as a matter of course)... just the fever and its attendant side effects. Oh, and it switches my left hand's sensory receptors completely off, because the slightest elevation in my body temperature does that thanks to the scars from my second MS attack. So that's fun. You have no idea what this looked like before I backed up and typed a bunch of it over again.

So anyway, yeah, I had to help install a refrigerator, move the old one to a holding area in the house (ironically, the new room we built in 2019 that would have become the new bathroom if, you know, we'd been able to keep working on it), triage all the food and get what I thought could be salvaged into the new fridge, and so forth in that state. With my father, who hasn't visited since COVID kicked off in order to avoid exposure to, well... viruses. We were both masked up the whole time, of course, and only approached within six feet of each other when we had to because we were, say, moving the same refrigerator, but still. I'm super fucking paranoid about that now.

It's been two days and I've gotten neither better nor worse. I'm planning to call the NP again tomorrow--uh, later today--and report. She may want me to get swabbed, although it didn't even come up on Monday; her clinical tech, on the phone, literally used the phrase "coming down with a little virus" and seemed decidedly of the opinion that it was NBD. Fluids and rest, son, you'll be fine. Ibuprofen--oh, you can't take ibuprofen. Well, that sucks. Tylenol isn't really very good for this kind of thing, but I guess you'll have to make do.

Meanwhile, remember that deferred class presentation? I have to give that on Thursday. I'm also on the hook for THIS week's reading, which I haven't been able to concentrate on at all. John Keegan is, let me just say, a somewhat vexing historian at the best of times, and this is not the best of times. He's an academic of the "if a thing is worth thinking, it's worth overthinking" clade, which I have a hard enough time parsing when I'm not shivering under two blankets in my recliner, wishing biological life on this planet could find a way to do without RNA.

Fuck, as I believe the young persons say, my life.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
somewhat less epic venting [View All] Gryphonadmin Feb-24-21 TOP
   RE: somewhat less epic venting NHO Feb-24-21 1
      RE: somewhat less epic venting Gryphonadmin Feb-24-21 2
   RE: somewhat less epic venting Gryphonadmin Feb-26-21 3
      RE: somewhat less epic venting Zemyla Feb-26-21 4
      RE: somewhat less epic venting Sofaspud Mar-01-21 5
   Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't Gryphonadmin Mar-15-21 6
      RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't ImpulsiveAlexia Mar-17-21 9
      RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't drakensis Mar-17-21 10
      RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't DaemeonX Mar-18-21 11
          RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't Gryphonadmin Mar-18-21 12
          RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't ImpulsiveAlexia Mar-22-21 16
              RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't DaemeonX Mar-24-21 17
                  RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't dbrandon Mar-25-21 18
                      RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't DaemeonX Apr-02-21 19
                          RE: Are You Fucking Kidding Me dep't dbrandon Apr-05-21 26
   coda: the fridge, 1997-2021 Gryphonadmin Mar-16-21 7
      RE: coda: the fridge, 1997-2021 McFortner Mar-16-21 8
      RE: coda: the fridge, 1997-2021 Zemyla Mar-18-21 13
          RE: coda: the fridge, 1997-2021 Gryphonadmin Mar-18-21 14
              RE: coda: the fridge, 1997-2021 dbrandon Mar-19-21 15
   RE: somewhat less epic venting Gryphonadmin Apr-02-21 20
      RE: somewhat less epic venting Vorticity Apr-03-21 21
          RE: somewhat less epic venting drakensis Apr-04-21 22
              RE: somewhat less epic venting DaPatman89 Apr-04-21 24
                  RE: somewhat less epic venting drakensis Apr-05-21 25
                      RE: somewhat less epic venting cw_gilbert Jul-05-21 30
                          RE: somewhat less epic venting drakensis Jul-06-21 31
                          RE: somewhat less epic venting Gryphonadmin Jul-06-21 32
                              RE: somewhat less epic venting cw_gilbert Jul-08-21 33
          RE: somewhat less epic venting Gryphonadmin Apr-04-21 23
      RE: somewhat less epic venting Gryphonadmin Apr-07-21 27
          RE: somewhat less epic venting McFortner Apr-07-21 28
              RE: somewhat less epic venting StClair Apr-29-21 29
   RE: somewhat less epic venting BlackAeronaut Jul-22-21 34


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