Just venting

The clothes dryer wasn't working because the heating coil quit Thursday night. I could tell, thanks to my keen powers of observation, when the cold, wet clothes I put in were still wet after tumbling around in a cold dryer for an hour and a half.

I consulted with my trusted sidekick Dr. Watson, who confirmed my suspicion that, yep, it's the heating coil alright. She did the real work of calling the repair shop, then calling the supply store to find out whether we could just buy a new coil and replace it ourselves, and finally getting it done by a professional from Apex for a reasonable amount of money.

The cause of the problem was unclear, but it might have had something to do with a clog in a low spot of the long and circuitous path that the hose took from the dryer to the vent outside the house. Venting warm, moist air in or underneath the house isn't recommended, and we don't need any moisture issues with our 120-year-old foundation.

So we chose to change the outgoing path of dryer air from the twisting, turning diagonal vent, made mostly of flexible tubing, that I cleverly devised when we moved in six years ago to a straight shot to the nearest exterior wall, as any rational person would have done in the first place. It took a while to determine which path to take from the back corner of an interior room to one of two outside walls, and my able assistant was very helpful in reducing the three possible options to the one obvious choice: straight back. Hamlet should have had her to help him cut through his endless deliberations.

While Dr. Ophelia Watson bought a couple of sheet metal vent pipes at the local Home Despot, doing our part to help Arthur Blank buy players for the Falcons and contribute campaign funds for Republicans in Georgia, I set to work making holes to vent through. Soliloquy (aside): Everyone has a special calling in life, and this is mine. Given enough practice, almost anyone can increase their skill at making holes in wood or a variety of other materials, and then going about the important work of venting hot air from their own chosen interior space to the relative safety of some nearby nontoxic exterior space. What can I say? It's what I do.

A little work with the jig saw succeeded in cutting a nearly round hole in the floorboards in the back corner of the laundry room, providing access to the shallow crawl space below. Meanwhile, there was enough of a break in the snowstorm for me to hunker down next to the back step outside and shine a light in the foot-square opening to the crawl space, piecing together exactly 13 feet of metal tubing (with an elbow), and feeding it in through the crawl space to the hole in the floor, in the snow, in the dark. You could cut the dramatic tension - and the duct tape - with a small utility knife.

To make a short story long - again, this is what I do; if you want snappy AP style, go read somebody else's boring blog - the vent hose from the dryer hooked right up with the upward-turned elbow just below the hole in the floor, and we dried a load of clothes that night, edified by the whole learning-by-doing experience.

Shoveling snow is much more therapeutic than fixing broken household devices, besides its obvious utilitarian value. So when the whole venting thing got frustrating, I would just take a break and shovel snow for a while and then felt better.

The next day Zelda came over for dinner, and the three of us watched the Superbowl together just like a regular Amerikan family. Actually two-thirds of us focused primarily on the badly crafted, unbelievably expensive and ill-conceived advertising that used the game as a carnival sideshow cum visual facade to sell snake oil to us rubes in the provinces. The other one-third of us watched very big, very fast men clad in armor bedecked in gang colors knocking each other down and preening for the crowd of like a hundred million consumers of goods and services.

Somewhere in that unlikely domestic scene, triggered by an ad for something - I don't know what - that referenced a YouTube clip about a little kid coming home still half-anaesthetized from the dentist, the three of us found ourselves in conversation about, how shall I say, our own youthful experiences under some form of medication. You can't plan that kind of parent-child disclosure, and it was good to get it out.