Fast Times at Kirkwood High

I'm up at Kirkwood, in a kind of space capsule ski place. Outside blizzardy, inside the fireplace turns on with a switch, as does the shiny new red tea kettle (thanks Margann!) on its round plastic black base plugged into the wall.

Except yesterday was a tough day for our space ship. The roof started leaking, with ten feet of snow on top of it; water found its way down the wall, across the joist, down the other wall; the joist began dripping, so we too our kitchen and put it under the leaks. Then the water found its way to the floor below; repeat kitchenware on floor, towels. The space ship has a non Star Trek Engineering room, which is a closet into which is shoved lots of tanks and boxes and wires and copper tubing and switches. You can't get in to see the gauge on the hot water heater; again, if this were Star Trek, we'd need a race of aliens who bend in impossible ways and are about four inches thick to get around and see what's what with our dilithium crystals and impulse engines.

So when the hot water ran out we found out that hot water also heats the place; thus our spaceship had no heat or hot water, and I discovered this standing in cold water in three places (bath shower other shower) and got grumpier than usual for me and stood in front of the working nonnatural fireplace and warmed up in my towel. Yes, I took a heat bath.

This leads me to a quick post before I go off to ski: when Ray Bradbury wrote his 1950 story The Veldt, he imagined both smart houses, and a kind of virtual reality nursery where things go horribly wrong. Up here at 8000 feet where it can snow ten feet in a short time, the smart house can turn out to also be stupid. Why? Not because we can't design new buildings to work in snow; of course we can. But the economics of the system whereby such buildings are designed, paid for, and built, filters everything; it is a network with lot of places to go terribly awry. This isn't new news, but it should give us pause when we talk about "technology" to remember that the invisible systems - discursive, economic, cultural - allow a ski place built in the 1930s by volunteers from the Sierra Club to outlast and outperform a building built over 7 years in the 21st Century costing many mucho dinero.

But that fireplace heated the entire downstairs, even if it is a cyborg fireplace.