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captainsblogUnprovements? Exprovements? Work with me here, spellcheck:P
While I was being fitted for a teething ring on Tuesday, Eleanor was home, keeping the house from being blowed up. A month or so ago, she signed up for an energy audit of the house, and a woman came by a few weeks back with various tools, testers and forms. The news was a mix of good and not so good, but the biggest bad was her identifying four small gas leaks in the cellar. One in the connection to the dryer, one in the feed to the water heater, and two others at shutoffs along the supply line. None was at the point of leaking the rotten-egg smell, but they've been replaced or (in the case of the dryer) cleaned out and securely reattached. Eleanor feels a lot more comfortable operating power tools down there now.
They also figured out that we probably are going to need a new furnace, sooner rather than later. It's been over 20 years since we replaced the HVAC equipment that was original to the house and, in the case of the original central air, a Frankenstein concoction of the first owner's own doing. The furnace seemed fine in the last heating season, but we haven't had any service on it, emergency or routine, in ages.
Then yesterday, that part of the audit got a swift kick in the checklist: when I got home, Eleanor, who'd been home herself for about an hour, had just discovered that the central air was not turning on. We have a programmable thermostat, but also last-millennium. The usual way of "turning it on" is simply to slide a switch to "cool." If the actual temp is above what it's programmed for, it will snap to life; or, you can override it and select a lower temp to aim for. Neither worked. The thermostat is battery operated, so I switched those AA's out. Then I checked the breaker, which was fine; the fan function also worked, so it was getting power and the thermostat was sending something to the AC unit.
I wondered if there was any chance the gas leak dude had turned something off or jiggled something, but it was too late to call and find out. Meanwhile, I tested a hunch and kept tamping the target temperature way down into the mid-60s F, and once I got to around 66, the compressor came right on and stayed there until we turned it off for the night.
I put in a call to a local HVAC contractor this morning. We'd seen them over across the street earlier in the week, and they're one of the lower-key players in the local market. There are about a dozen who waste so much money on advertising and jingles and "special offer" promotions, you wonder who's paying for all that. (Hint: you are.) I asked our neighbor how they worked out for them and he gave them a good review. Their AC completely crapped out when, it turned out, some form of varmint tunneled into the compressor and started chewing on the wires.
So one of their guys is coming over this afternoon to check the thermostat and quote the bigger job.
Other than those biggies, we're in better shape than expected. Our insulation is decent, the attic ventilation needs some improvement but not as much as they see in some homes of this age, and the roof work from also around 20 years ago isn't showing any major leakage issues. They didn't even get into improvements of windows and doors, which we know have to be done.
So we gots some work to do.
----
Unrelated to this is something I observed on Monday. I am hoping it isn't a sign of a growing trend.
My hearing Monday afternoon was my first time in an actual courtroom since the middle of March. It was the second time that day that I encountered a renewed mandate of "masks for everybody, even you smart ones that got vaccinated." The building was nearly empty of civilians at 2:30 p.m., chairs had been removed or cordoned off, and it was the first time I really got a sense that our country had massively fucked up the COVID response.
But that's not the trend. That came five floors up.
Our courtroom for the day was on the top floor of the Rochester Hall of Justice. When I started practicing in that city and had almost all of my state court cases in that ugly Brutalist structure, the appellate court for all of Western New York had its facilities up on that top floor. They moved those judges out to a fancy schmancy new place on the far other side of downtown from most lawyers' offices about 20 years ago. Part of their trappings was a very serviceable law library, mainly for the judges' own research but the hoi poloi could use it, too. That library moved with the Appellate Division to the new digs, and for a few years the entire floor sat mostly empty. Over time, other courtrooms, and the entire Surrogates Court, moved into the available space, and after much grumping from the local practicing bar, the state opened a smaller but still decent law library in some of the appellate court library's former space. It had Lexis/Westlaw access, the ability to print minor amounts of stuff from those computers or a flash drive, and helpful librarians. Then COVID hit, and the doors closed.
Monday, probably my first time on that floor in a year or so, the doors were gone. The law library's once and former space has been disappeared, in favor of a new courtroom and an attorney-client meeting space. I did not check to see if it was relocated somewhere else in the building, but there was no signage to that effect, and official court sites continue to list that space as the library's location. I assume that, at best, it is now operated in collaboration with Unseen University.
I've seen other indications of this trend. Federal courts in Rochester never had a library for the public, but their Buffalo counterparts had a nice one on the top floor of the original art deco courthouse from FDR years that I used for my own research and as a stopping over point between hearings in the bankruptcy courtrooms below. That building was eventually deemed too old, small and insecure for federal judges, so a much bigger facility was built on Niagara Square in the oughts, including what was touted as a "state of the art" law library for the judges, practicing bar and public. I didn't use it much, because Bankruptcy Court wasn't included in the original move in there. A couple of years ago, though, they changed some other plans around, and the bankruptcy judges and clerks I knew moved into the Jackson (Robert, Not Andrew)Courthouse.
The chief Bankruptcy Judge took all of the local practitioners on a tour a few months after the move. It included a stop up at that library, no longer looking particularly "state of the art," and he explained why: because of the increase in the local federal caseload (mostly criminal) and the likely addition to the panel of federal judges in Buffalo, the government designed that law library to be struck down on a moment's notice and quickly converted into space for a new courtroom, chambers and surrounding security rabbit warrens.
This revelation seemed consistent with something I'd seen during in the days leading up to the Bankruptcy Court's move over there: outside their former facilities, as workers hauled desks and computers and other vitals onto moving trucks, there was a dumpster filled with law books. And not ancient ones, either, but the most recently bound volumes of the federal court decisions by which we live our professional lives. The chief judge's own chambers confirmed this thinking; it had been built with walls of bookshelves to hold those very bound volumes, but they sat empty, months after the move. He seemed a little wistful as we passed them, saying, "They don't really like to spend money on books."
In fairness, probably 90 percent or more of my own research these days is done without cracking an actual spine (other than the creaks coming from my own). But for some fields, there's nothing like a good browse through actual pages of actual words, and it's a damn shame we're limiting it as an option.
While I was being fitted for a teething ring on Tuesday, Eleanor was home, keeping the house from being blowed up. A month or so ago, she signed up for an energy audit of the house, and a woman came by a few weeks back with various tools, testers and forms. The news was a mix of good and not so good, but the biggest bad was her identifying four small gas leaks in the cellar. One in the connection to the dryer, one in the feed to the water heater, and two others at shutoffs along the supply line. None was at the point of leaking the rotten-egg smell, but they've been replaced or (in the case of the dryer) cleaned out and securely reattached. Eleanor feels a lot more comfortable operating power tools down there now.
They also figured out that we probably are going to need a new furnace, sooner rather than later. It's been over 20 years since we replaced the HVAC equipment that was original to the house and, in the case of the original central air, a Frankenstein concoction of the first owner's own doing. The furnace seemed fine in the last heating season, but we haven't had any service on it, emergency or routine, in ages.
Then yesterday, that part of the audit got a swift kick in the checklist: when I got home, Eleanor, who'd been home herself for about an hour, had just discovered that the central air was not turning on. We have a programmable thermostat, but also last-millennium. The usual way of "turning it on" is simply to slide a switch to "cool." If the actual temp is above what it's programmed for, it will snap to life; or, you can override it and select a lower temp to aim for. Neither worked. The thermostat is battery operated, so I switched those AA's out. Then I checked the breaker, which was fine; the fan function also worked, so it was getting power and the thermostat was sending something to the AC unit.
I wondered if there was any chance the gas leak dude had turned something off or jiggled something, but it was too late to call and find out. Meanwhile, I tested a hunch and kept tamping the target temperature way down into the mid-60s F, and once I got to around 66, the compressor came right on and stayed there until we turned it off for the night.
I put in a call to a local HVAC contractor this morning. We'd seen them over across the street earlier in the week, and they're one of the lower-key players in the local market. There are about a dozen who waste so much money on advertising and jingles and "special offer" promotions, you wonder who's paying for all that. (Hint: you are.) I asked our neighbor how they worked out for them and he gave them a good review. Their AC completely crapped out when, it turned out, some form of varmint tunneled into the compressor and started chewing on the wires.
So one of their guys is coming over this afternoon to check the thermostat and quote the bigger job.
Other than those biggies, we're in better shape than expected. Our insulation is decent, the attic ventilation needs some improvement but not as much as they see in some homes of this age, and the roof work from also around 20 years ago isn't showing any major leakage issues. They didn't even get into improvements of windows and doors, which we know have to be done.
So we gots some work to do.
----
Unrelated to this is something I observed on Monday. I am hoping it isn't a sign of a growing trend.
My hearing Monday afternoon was my first time in an actual courtroom since the middle of March. It was the second time that day that I encountered a renewed mandate of "masks for everybody, even you smart ones that got vaccinated." The building was nearly empty of civilians at 2:30 p.m., chairs had been removed or cordoned off, and it was the first time I really got a sense that our country had massively fucked up the COVID response.
But that's not the trend. That came five floors up.
Our courtroom for the day was on the top floor of the Rochester Hall of Justice. When I started practicing in that city and had almost all of my state court cases in that ugly Brutalist structure, the appellate court for all of Western New York had its facilities up on that top floor. They moved those judges out to a fancy schmancy new place on the far other side of downtown from most lawyers' offices about 20 years ago. Part of their trappings was a very serviceable law library, mainly for the judges' own research but the hoi poloi could use it, too. That library moved with the Appellate Division to the new digs, and for a few years the entire floor sat mostly empty. Over time, other courtrooms, and the entire Surrogates Court, moved into the available space, and after much grumping from the local practicing bar, the state opened a smaller but still decent law library in some of the appellate court library's former space. It had Lexis/Westlaw access, the ability to print minor amounts of stuff from those computers or a flash drive, and helpful librarians. Then COVID hit, and the doors closed.
Monday, probably my first time on that floor in a year or so, the doors were gone. The law library's once and former space has been disappeared, in favor of a new courtroom and an attorney-client meeting space. I did not check to see if it was relocated somewhere else in the building, but there was no signage to that effect, and official court sites continue to list that space as the library's location. I assume that, at best, it is now operated in collaboration with Unseen University.
I've seen other indications of this trend. Federal courts in Rochester never had a library for the public, but their Buffalo counterparts had a nice one on the top floor of the original art deco courthouse from FDR years that I used for my own research and as a stopping over point between hearings in the bankruptcy courtrooms below. That building was eventually deemed too old, small and insecure for federal judges, so a much bigger facility was built on Niagara Square in the oughts, including what was touted as a "state of the art" law library for the judges, practicing bar and public. I didn't use it much, because Bankruptcy Court wasn't included in the original move in there. A couple of years ago, though, they changed some other plans around, and the bankruptcy judges and clerks I knew moved into the Jackson (Robert, Not Andrew)Courthouse.
The chief Bankruptcy Judge took all of the local practitioners on a tour a few months after the move. It included a stop up at that library, no longer looking particularly "state of the art," and he explained why: because of the increase in the local federal caseload (mostly criminal) and the likely addition to the panel of federal judges in Buffalo, the government designed that law library to be struck down on a moment's notice and quickly converted into space for a new courtroom, chambers and surrounding security rabbit warrens.
This revelation seemed consistent with something I'd seen during in the days leading up to the Bankruptcy Court's move over there: outside their former facilities, as workers hauled desks and computers and other vitals onto moving trucks, there was a dumpster filled with law books. And not ancient ones, either, but the most recently bound volumes of the federal court decisions by which we live our professional lives. The chief judge's own chambers confirmed this thinking; it had been built with walls of bookshelves to hold those very bound volumes, but they sat empty, months after the move. He seemed a little wistful as we passed them, saying, "They don't really like to spend money on books."
In fairness, probably 90 percent or more of my own research these days is done without cracking an actual spine (other than the creaks coming from my own). But for some fields, there's nothing like a good browse through actual pages of actual words, and it's a damn shame we're limiting it as an option.
Oh my
Date: 2021-08-07 12:54 pm (UTC)