Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Interstitial S p a c e s

Pardon the interruption. With this I'm ending the longest break from weblogging since this buggy started rolling in early January. I was flying around the countryside over the weekend, banking through snowclouds and enjoying short layovers in Detroit and Cleveland on the way East. Since I left on Saturday, which, by the way, was highlighted by a short visit with my dad and S. in the Detroit airport, I've really missed blogging--or missed the time for blogging as a way of re-collecting dispersions of thought. And there've been dispersions aplenty--promising ones.

Saturday was, for me, the coldest Lupercalia on record. First off, D. was back home, snug in K.C., but aside from that, the wall unit in Ramada 233 suffered a meltdown. Late at night. What the? Yes. At 2:30 a.m., I woke up to a dingy-smelling PVC smoke. A faint odor, like burnt wiring, perhaps from a nearby room. No! My room. Geez. I felt the wall-mounted heating unit. It was burning up. I had set it to five (out of a possible 12), thinking that it would get my room to between 68-70 degrees for the night. So, before the smoke alarm started its awful hooting, I dialed the front desk and declared my predicament. Room 233. The night manager showed up just after the blaring started--the alarm in my room only was sounding off. He said he could hear it in the hall. Great. It was V-Day night and the loving hour, no less, I thought. So the night manager slid the plastic alarm from the ceiling; meanwhile, I opened the window. Two degrees Fahrenheit. He tugged on the nine-volts, but the screamer was hard-wired--rightly so. Finally, N.M. resorted to rip the blaring alarm from the ceiling. In silence and wonder, we reconciled a bad plan for restoring normalcy to my night. I'd sleep; he'd go back to the desk and write a note for the next day's service person. With windows closed and no heat except my own, I took cover, dreamless. It was, in retrospect, the low-point of the trip, the rest of which was incredibly warm and welcoming.

Posted by Derek Mueller at February 17, 2004 8:12 PM to Ground Swell