Ice palace
Spent the whole day yesterday with a broken furnace and a promise from the dispatcher at a furnace repair company that they would be at my house “sometime” that day to fix it. You mean like between 12 and 4? No we mean sometime. This furnace repair company works 24 hours a day, so it could be a while. I told the dispatcher that I was without heat. Surely that should bump me up the queue. Yeah, well, we have at least a dozen no heat calls. Oh, I see. But I’ve got a pretty bad head cold. It could develop into something worse from sitting around in a frigid house all day. It’s like 20 degrees outside, for goodness sake. I sniffled real loud and feigned a cough for added emphasis. You want me to bump the chemo patient or the assisted living old-age home to make room for you? Okay, I said, sometime today will have to do. You promise? Pretty much.
I called at 7am. The furnace guy showed up about 2pm. I answered the door wearing corduroy pants, turtleneck, sweater, gloves, and a blanket thrown over my shoulder like a cape. I don’t do winter well, even with a working furnace. It’s $95 just to do the diagnostics on the furnace. I told the guy exactly what was wrong. The fan motor had seized up. Uh huh, he said, we’ll see about that. He clanked around for the better part of a minute and said, looks like the fan motor is malfunctioning. I asked: do I get some kind of discount for knowing in advance what was wrong? Apparently, I get a smile. The first one’s free, he said.
He doesn’t have the replacement part, of course. But there is a reasonable possibility that he can get a new fan motor and come back. Sometime later. You do mean today? I needed clarification. Oh yeah, I’m guessing we’ll have you fixed by the end of the day. The words “I’m guessing” rolled around in my head. I sighed. I sniffled. I coughed (for real this time). He smiled again. I told him I wasn’t paying for that.
The furnace guy comes back around 5:30 with a box under his arm. I was encouraged. He looked at me all bundled up and shivering and said that in about ninety minutes there would be heat in the house. And that’s pretty much how it went. Around 7pm I heard the furnace kick on and felt a faint sensation of warm air flowing around me. The furnace guy packed up and presented me with a bill for the remaining $520. I tried to write him a check, but the ink in the pen wouldn’t flow. It was too cold in the house. There’s a certain poetic justice in that.
Later that evening, as the furnace still raced to catch up to the set point on the thermostat, I sat downstairs under an electric blanket and surfed the channels on TV. There was a program on PBS about a ice palace in Sweden – literally a grand hotel made completely of ice. Apparently, the Swedes build one of these every year. It is a magnificent structure replete with a grand lobby (ice chandeliers!), a theater, even a bar. All the guest rooms are uniquely designed with intricately carved ice artwork. There were a lot of statistics being tossed about by the narrator. If you stacked all the ice blocks on top of one another, they would stretch to the moon or Uruguay or something like that. Who can remember those details? It was a lot of ice, that’s for sure. And in the Spring it would all melt away, back into the river.
I guess what really struck me about this ice palace was that people came from all over the world to stay there. People even got married there. The ice palace had a chapel. The documentary followed people around as they checked in and got acquainted with the hotel. Apparently, they all loved it. I found myself yelling at the TV. Oh go on! You people are crazy. Inside the hotel it was a constant 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Guests mingled in the bar wearing parkas and fur-lined hats with earflaps and drank cocktails out of glasses made from ice. Narrator: “You can’t take these glasses home as souvenirs.” Oh please. They applauded the live performances in the theater by clapping their hands together inside of insulated gloves. Then they showed people getting ready to bed down for the night. They slept on platform beds on top of reindeer skins inside of mummy sleeping bags. One fellow looked at the camera and said, “You get used to the temperatures in here. It’s not as bad as I imagined.” There was steam coming out of his mouth as he spoke.
Okay, admittedly, this was probably not the right night for me to watch a program about a hotel made of ice. At its lowest point, the temperature inside my house today was probably 55 degrees. Uncomfortable, for sure, but that would still feel like the tropics in comparison to the ice palace. No, I’m sorry, but the ice palace in Sweden goes on the list of places I can die without seeing. Besides, after paying the furnace repair guy, where am I going to come up with the airfare to Sweden?
8:45:09 PM  Stories
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