hot tub = oh no!

Hot tub. April 19, 2006.

I was going to write something about how the long saga of our hot tub installation had "reached its euphoric conclusion." But, of course, the saga must continue. After its first twenty hours of operation, it started tripping the circuit breaker. So now it sits, water temperature 102 degrees Fahrenheit and falling slowly. Maybe the heating element died? (It is, after all, six years old.) We did the few basic diagnostic tests we could but they revealed nothing. On Tuesday (a week!) a technician can come look at it.

But it was a grand twenty hours! It was a warm day (65 degrees!) but water from the tap is still 48 degrees, just like Lake Hemlock to the South from which it comes. We threw the switches on the fifty amp, 240 volt circuit and the thing dutifully set to work, carrying the water temperature up at 3.3 degrees per hour. Nate jumped in when it hit 85. Ryan, Lisa, and I took to the waters at dawn, when we'd estimated it would hit 100. In the morning, there it was, faithfully level at the setpoint of one hundred and four degrees. And then it was continuously occupied through the late afternoon. Nate brought over his dog and set up a barbecue and a bonfire. Bree herself, perpetually cold but now finally warm, couldn't leave the waters—her facial expression reminded me so much of Sam McGee.

Brooklyn

Ryan (four) in a subway station. April 16, 2006.

We went to New York this weekend. My first trip since I moved to this state to that eponymous metropolis.

I've been to New York before. On a school trip in 1997 (note hilarious contemporary website; also, the most high-brow travel with which I've ever been associated). Then passing through on my Grand Public Transportation Adventure of 2001. On that trip I came home from school one day and realized it was the beginning of spring break. I called Continental Airlines and left a couple hours later, leaving a few vague voicemails with long-unseen friends alluding to (threatening?) my impending arrival. That was a good trip, my first forray into what I suppose is called "independent travel." The extent of my stay in NYC proper, though, was to walk from Penn Station to Grand Central. I read Catcher In The Rye and visited all my friends in fancy colleges. Another time in transit between Chinatown busses.

This trip was to visit Chris. There were four of us, me and Bree and Lisa and Ryah. We wandered lazy Brooklyn streets. We drank beer at sidewalk cafes, examined free things on sidewalks. Ate delicious Mexican food at a twenty-four hour diner. Bree spoke a lot of Spanish. We slept on the hardwood floor of Chris's little apartment, made cozy by our bundles of blankets and pillows. It was a hot night. Sat on the fire escape. Attended a show in a hipster cave, Cloyne Court co-opers playing at Cakeshop. Walked across the Brooklyn bridge. Chris's apartment is littered with the remnants of our old apartment, lending a strange familiarity to the scene.

On Saturday before Easter it rained cherry blossoms upon us, hand-in-hand, in Central Park (okay, I'm told they are crab apple blossoms, but that's just not quite so poetic) and Bree and I walked a bit of the Met in exchange for our token $1 contribution, but the grandeur of the weekend was the lazy times in Brooklyn.