MY WEIRDEST NEW YEAR'S EVE

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

This year’s New Year’s Eve was pleasant and uneventful, but that was not the case eight years ago! The Fall of 2001 was a tough one for our heating systems. Just a few days after “9/11” the gas company “red tagged” the parsonage furnace as unsafe. It was a real stretch, but the church managed to buy a new gas furnace for the parsonage that Fall. Then, in December of ‘01, we had a serious problem with the oil (forced hot water) heating system at the 32 South Street church building. One circulator pump was non functional and just pouring water into a bucket in the boiler room. On December 31, of all days, we had a service man in to replace the circulator pump.

Now, gas forced hot air (such as we have at the parsonage) creates a house that’s DRY and DUSTY and with that come a number of problems, BUT an oil forced hot water system has problems of its own. After major service such as replacing a circulator pump is done, the system has to be “bled” of the air that’s gotten into the water lines or it just won’t work properly. To “bleed” it PROPERLY can take several hours. The service man finished up around 4:30. Was he going to hang around for 6 more hours bleeding the system? No way. So, it just wasn’t working properly.

At the time, a guy named “Bob” who worked as a custodian for the State was a Member of our church. He offered to go to the church building with me around 7:30 P.M. and spend some time bleeding the lines. It was slow and tedious. The church heating system dates from early 1954. Bob turned one old rusty fitting that started heavily dripping water...well it was more like a “pouring” of water, and he could not get it to stop. We had plastic dishes and towels down. We had water pouring. It was 11:45 P.M. What were we to do?

I telephoned “Bill”, another church Member who is an auto mechanic and former boiler mechanic. Bill arrived at the church building around 12:15.

Happy New Year, 2002! (or not...)

Bill had lots of experience dealing with problems like this one. It took hours of Bill gently applying a wrench and tweaking the entire system. By 2 A.M. the water at the leaking fitting was down to about one drip every 30 seconds. By 4 A.M. it was down to about one drip every 2 minutes. By 5 A.M. it was pretty well stopped...well maybe one drip an hour...
After that it was maybe one drip a week, if that, which is certainly manageable!
We left the building at 5:15 A.M. When I went over to the building at 7:30 I had no idea I’d be there for ten hours ; and that I’d always remember how 2002 arrived! I went to bed at 5:30 and got up at 9:30. I went back over to the church building to discover that someone had scrawled graffiti with blue paint all over one side of the building! (We’ve had probably ten graffiti incidents since July 1994- all of them have happened during summer months EXCEPT that one!) We ended up contacting the Framingham Police Department. In the Spring, the police had a group of young people who had to do community service hours paint out the graffiti.

2002 had a rough start. You’d think it would have been a horrible year. It wasn’t. In fact, 2002 was one of the three or four best years of my life. Mary Ann and I took a wonderful trip to Alaska that summer to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. In the Fall of ‘02 we took a long weekend to Prince Edward Island. In February of ‘02 I traveled to Springfield, Missouri with my daughter Amy to look at Evangel University. That was my first time back to Springfield, Missouri in 23 years, but I’ve been back at least 8 times since then. 2002 was one of the few years in my adult life that I had an excess of spending money around (due to an estate settlement), Yeah, it had a bad start but it was a good year.

It doesn’t seem possible that January 1, 2002 was 8 years ago! That still chalks up as my weirdest New Year’s Eve ever!