Westin New York at Times Square

I got up early and rode off at dawn. Water main work on Wydown is now in full swing, so what was once the premier bicycling road in town is now mostly a construction site and I’m afraid that it is only going to get worse, before it gets better. I even saw one of those big asphalt scraping machines being dropped off in the park. It looks like they are going to be repaving the stretch of road below Government Hill. Even with all this road work going on, it was good to get out and ride by myself for a change, but without a friendly skirt to hide behind, the big dogs were on me like fresh meat. I felt naked.

I didn’t notice the temperature at home until I stepped out of the shower. It was cold in the house, way colder than the seventy-some degrees it was outside. By this time Anne was up too and she was complaining that it was too cold. Checking the thermostat, it said that it was 65 ºF in the house and the thermostat was set to 83 ºF. How did it get to be so cold? I was confused. My confusion was multiplied a moment later when I realized the air conditioning was still running. This shouldn’t be. At the thermostat I moved it from cooling to off and also turned off fan. The fan stopped, but not the air conditioning. I could still hear the coolant percolating through the pipes and could see that the outside unit was also still running. Originally, I thought that human error had led to the thermostat being manually set too low, but it now dawned on me that the unit wasn’t operating correctly at all. I had to go outside and pull out the breaker to shut it down.

By this time I was running late for a doctor’s appointment and had to leave. I called the people who had been out last week when the air conditioner was not working at all, instead of today’s phenomenon where it was working overtime. If I hadn’t had this appointment I would have already left for work by then. I shudder to think what I would have found then when I returned. Would it be a Pooh-cicle frozen in place, perpetually working on her ice-bound quilt? Anne might have shut off the fan, but with the rest of the air conditioner still running, the heat exchanger would have frozen up and soon the whole unit would have been irrevocably broken. In the last two weeks, we’ve sunk in as much as the unit originally cost, 20 years ago. I’m thinking that in the off-season it is time to replace instead of continuing to repair. That is assuming the unit makes it to the off-season.

I had my annual physical this morning. My doctor poked and prodded me to his heart’s content and then he sent me down the hall to have my blood drawn. The guy doing this has been around for years and usually he is pretty good at his job, but not today. First he stuck me in my right arm, but no blood came out, not even a drop. He started asking me if I had drunk any water this morning, inferring that my blood must be nearly coagulated or something. I told him I had, but he kept asking me about my water consumption. He has signs about his work area that say, “Drink a glass of water, your liver will like it.” Next he stuck me in my left arm. This time he hit the vein and my blood flowed. After this busy morning, it was a relief to get to work.

Last Sunday morning, I awoke to a summer rainstorm. It wasn’t violent or anything, just really, really wet, but way more quiet than this morning. Since I couldn’t go outside, I started working on the blog. I searched my now rather extensive archive and lists of photos that have never quite made it. Almost all of the photos from this week’s posts were uploaded then. This post’s photo proved quite the quandary. It was taken in 2009 on our NYC trip. The problem was I couldn’t come up with a title any more creative than “NYC Building”, like they don’t have many of those there. Anne and I must have spent an hour together retracing our bike route in Google maps, all the way down to street view, up the Westside from Battery Park to Times Square. Eventually we figured out that it was a photo of the Westin near Times Square. It turns out Anne took the picture.