A Mopping Opportunity

For me, late fall is a season of melancholic, pensive moods. A time punctuated by bipolar ups and and downs while I remember the beauty of previous weeks and adjust to the impending gloom of another winter. As we do not have any major projects in progress at the moment (compared to last year) I've considered many topics for this week's post including:

The True Opportunity Cost of Owning an Old House
Why Aren't My Rain Gutters Leaf Gutters Too?
How We Lost Our Souls to Mechanization
What is Lost in Keeping Online Privacy and Anonymity?
Accustomed to the Outhouse
Geothermal - Here We Come
Why Fusion Will Never Save Us

But the House of 42 Doors always has a few tricks up its sleeve, and has given me something to write about. Some time ago, I made the mistake of allowing our radiators in the sun room to freeze and crack in the winter. We have yet to repair those radiators. We've kept the pipes to that heating loop turned off and all has been fine, although colder.

We scheduled our annual boiler maintenance and tune up yesterday. John came out, checked the pump, the emissions, the intake valve, the overhead storage tank and did an overall tune up of the system. And then he opened up all the valves to make sure everything was working OK.

Meanwhile, several minutes later, my wife noticed a growing pool of black water growing in the sun room and leaking into the living room. She could see the water squirting out of the radiators. The floor in the sun room is tile. The living room floor is wood. She called me to find out where the shut off valve for the sun room loop was, ran down to tell John, turned off the valve, and then proceeded to mop up the mess (Thanks!). The water was black because of the years and years of coal dust built up in the walls, cracks and crevices of the house.

No damage was done, and we are only out the gallons of water that was spilled. The sun room tile floor is cleaner than it probably ever has been since we bought the place. The wood floor and living room carpet have dried out. It caused a good deal of stress to my wife (because she had to deal with it), but I found the whole incident somewhat amusing.

It's made me think about directly attributable causality and the interaction of temporal events across seemingly large amounts of time. In this case, all the months that occurred between the radiators cracking and this incident could never have existed, or for that matter could have been double, triple or more. Any time that those valves were turned on this could have happened. Its as if time does not exist, as if there were the equivalent of a spatial wormhole, but in this case a temporal one, connecting two events, regardless of the distance in time...

Autumn - a pensive season indeed.