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Monday, February 23, 2015

Need to replace my phone, my shower head, my peace of mind, and god knows what else

I found the charger to my phone today.  That's actually a bad thing.  It means that I didn't leave the phone charging in an odd spot.  Which means that, in all likelihood, the reason I couldn't find it before coming home was that it fell out of my pocket, and if it fell out of my pocket it is much more likely to have done so outside where it will never be seen again.

So, I probably need a new phone.

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When I got home yesterday there was something wrong with my shower.  The water that came out of it was ... odd.  Dirty, strange.

I was able to, apparently correctly [see update], diagnose the problem as a valve being insufficiently tight on my furnace thus crossing the radiator water and the water-water.  (Hot water only, for whatever it's worth.)

I then did what I am always most likely to do in a case like that: I turned the valve the wrong way.

With no catastrophe obvious I promptly forgot about the whole thing except to wonder what it would cost to replace the furnace.

Today walking home it was cold.  Really, fucking cold.  I wasn't prepared for how cold it was.  The pain was horrific.  I really, truly, did not see that level of cold coming.  If I had I could have been prepared for it with additional layers and whatnot.

So I got home and wanted to take a warm shower to (carefully) stop my legs from falling off or otherwise succumbing to the painful, painful cold that had invaded them.

I turned on the hot water and waited to see if it was dirty.  It wasn't, which I thought meant I had turned the valve the correct way the night before.

Then it sped up.  Then it started to whistle and steam.

At this point I knew it had to be turned off, but I wasn't thinking the most clearly.  If I had been I could have realized that I could quickly switch from shower to bath with minimal risk and then it probably wouldn't have been too difficult to turn off the no-longer water.

The mostly-steam was coming out at an alarming rate with some bits of still-water spurting out erratically.  Now under pressure things can act strangely, but that wouldn't work in my favor here anyway, so we can just go with the rule of thumb: steam is hotter than boiling water.  Which means that any water in a water-steam mix is likely to be scary-hot.

Having not thought of the "switch from shower to bath" plan I was left trying to find an opportunity to reach in for long enough to turn the faucet enough to turn off the water.  Such an opportunity never came.

When the shower head broke apart, the largest part exploding outward and landing in the tub, that broke a mental block I was having (not the one mentioned above) and I realized how I could stop this steam machine.

I ran down stairs and pulled on a thingy.  Then I went up and checked if that did it.  All hot water was shut off.  Problem not solved, but deferred.

At that point, though, there was breathing room and I could turn the valve that had been loose before in the other direction, which seems to have fixed things.  Of course the exploding shower head didn't merely come apart.  There was a lot of steam, steam under pressure, going through it.  The heat warped the thing.

It can't be fixed, at least not easily.  No shower for me.

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My peace of mind is lacking in peace.  In fact I'm not sure that there's even a piece of peace in my mind.  The furnace leads to thoughts of oil.  I was away for ten days.  I forgot to turn down the heat so instead of only using enough oil to keep the pipes from freezing it kept the empty house warm enough for human habitation.

The steam monstrosity of today couldn't possibly have been good from an oil conservation standpoint.

The $500+ I spent to put oil in the tank is still something that I don't know how to pay for.  The problem with paying for things with debt is that, sooner or later, debts come due.

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I didn't sleep much last night.  Getting back to my own home and my own bed you'd think I'd sleep well, but I didn't.  I didn't eat for over 24 hours.  (I have since, though.)  Just sort of slipped my mind.  I fell on the way to school.  Before I was really able to assess the injury (it takes time) I was wondering if I could have gotten another concussion.  It was, as I recall, a year ago this month (or maybe early next month) that I got the concussion.

Good news is that there's no evidence of concussion.

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I had a differential equations test this morning.

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Please give me money, candy, steak dinner, hugs, a unicorn, or any combination of the previous.

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[update]
There's a whole post worth of update, but the short version is this: the water getting mixed that led me to discover a valve was lose wasn't, or wasn't primarily, due to the loose valve.  It was instead a result of a crack in the boiler.  A crack that has since expanded.  Showers are the least of my worries now.

2 comments:

  1. So I accidentally stumbled across your blog recently but man oh man. Am I allowed to laugh at your shower issues? Because I was chuckling to myself while reading it! Your description of "radiator water" and "water water" is hysterical. Mainly because we all completely understand what you mean! Thanks for making me laugh on this early dreary morning at work.

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