Our water heater has been on the fritz for a couple of days. The plumber was supposed to come by yesterday to look at it but there was a miscommunication and he didn’t show. Today, he did. After a couple of hours, they – there were two of them – decided they had resolved the issue and left. I went to take a shower, only to find out that there was still no hot water.
I phoned. Only one of them came back. He called another guy. There were two of them again.
After another couple of hours, they concluded that the problem can’t be resolved by anything other than a near complete overhaul of our heating and cooling system.
Fuck me.
Last year, right around this time, we had a leak from the tub, which resulted in a hold in the ceiling on the main floor that I haven’t finished patching up properly and me getting a new toilet, the latter of which I’m quite happy about. This year, it’s looking like it’s going to amount to a new water heater, air conditioner, and the plumbing that goes with it.
In the middle of all of this, I found myself in the kitchen unpacking our weekly vegetable delivery. In it, there was a bunch of fresh mint, the likes of which I had no idea what to do with. ChatGPT suggested, among many other options, that I dry it. I followed up by asking if I could use our air fryer to dehydrate it and use later to make tea. Turns out, I can.
So, while there were plumbers running back and forth between various faucets, the water heater, and the fan coil unit that pumps heating and cooling throughout the house, I was in the kitchen picking mint leaves from their stalks, preparing them to dehydrate them. Oddly enough, I had to wash and dry them first.
ChatGPT said that it should take about one-and-a-half to two hours at 100ºF to dehydrate the leaves. It took three hours in the air fryer spread out over about five hours.
What an odd thing for me to decide was important enough to fit into the spaces between chatting and learning from the plumbers, cleaning my office, entertaining my parents, and taking care of Emi. I barely had time enough to drink a third of a cup of my tea for the fourth time today.
We have to wait until after Christmas to get a quote and then decide on which option we’re going to choose before they’ll come through and fix things. For the time being, we’re cutting the flow of water to our heating to get hot water to the faucets. Magically, it’s the thermometer is reading 23ºC.
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