Best You - Keith Yocum
Keith Yocum is a fellow Cape Codder, and I have had the pleasure to read a number of his books. This one clearly parallels his opening sentence: “Many strange things in life cannot be explained.” This is a kind and gentle book and quite different from his others. For example, what appears to be a dead body in this story, is not dead.
Phillip Preston is a 36-year-old assistant bank manager who lives in a small seaside town and owns a boat. His wife has left him for his best friend. Until the opening event of this story, he is living a well-ordered, predictable, unimaginative life. He doesn’t have ambitions for major improvements in his future - perhaps just something akin to annual cost of living increases if he keeps his head down and does his job faithfully.
His personality is similar to that of William Wilmer in Robert Lawson’s Mr. Wilmer and Anthony Burgess’s (author of A Clockwork Orange) Ambrose in The Eve of Saint Venus, two of my best-book-shelf books. Mr. Wilmer is a mild mannered twenty-nine year old who learns on his twenty-ninth birthday that he can talk to animals.
Ambrose, in Burgess’s book, is a young mechanical engineer who is so nervous about getting married that he practices by putting the ring on the finger of the statue of Venus and the statue promptly closes her hand, making it impossible to remove the ring. Ambrose has effectively married the statue.
In Best You, what happens to Phillip Preston is as unreal as talking to animals or marrying a statue. Perhaps the protagonists in these tales need to be simple, decent people so that what happens to them is a sharp contrast to their every day lives. Perhaps the character has to be simple in order to accept the “willing suspension of disbelief” and to allow that to transfer to the reader.
Frankly, I didn’t want to like the book because I didn’t like the title. It’s simple. It’s not witty, ironic, or clever. I shouldn’t admit that because, as they say, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (or its title). But when I got to the end of the book, the title made sense and it fits.
Often a clever and simple premise is difficult to pull off. Difficulties arise that are unexplainable when referencing real life. People can’t actually talk to animals. Statues don’t actually move. And Phillip Preston in Best You can’t relate to what he experiences any more than the reader can. It is a challenge for the author to pull it off without sounding silly or ‘unrealistic’.
Yocum gets close to losing it at times, but is skillfully able to pull it back on track. This is a book worth reading.
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More about Mini-Splits and Heat Pumps - Oh My!
Heat pumps are too weird for me. After all these years I still have trouble wrapping my head around how something can pump heat out of ten degree air and heat the house with it. There is something inherently odd in the refrigerant boiling at forty or fifty degrees Fahrenheit when you're used to water boiling at 212°F. But I'm going to accept it. I mean I've lived with the refrigeration process in my refrigerator all my life. That thing pumps the heat out of the refrigerator box and chills the orange juice and all the other stuff.
I'm just going to go ahead and accept that. There's a lot of stuff that I don't understand about how my car works either. How important is it that we understand the wonders that happen behind the curtain?
There is a great deal of press about a transformation to an all-electric world. With the price of oil and gas, it is attractive to try to leap on the bandwagon and convert that old gas furnace to something electric. And what if you could throw some photovoltaic panels on the roof and convert sunlight to heating or cooling and not have to pay a utility bill at all?
I hate to say it, but as wonderful as all that sounds, it's not a simple process. Complexity leads to confusion and confusion leads to solution doctors who will solve all your problems for you and throw out a bunch of terms like SEER and AFUE and BTUs that you might not have any desire to understand. Luckily there's the internet and you certainly have to be careful about that information as well.
If you are going to look into replacing your existing system, be sure you start from the beginning. The sizing of the system is fundamental. If you don't want to do the sizing calculation yourself, be sure that whatever contractor you choose knows how to do it. Ask them for the ACCA (Air Conditioning Contractors of America) Manual J calculation. I have contractors tell me that that isn't necessary, sizing the system by the 'rule of thumb' will result in a system that will not operate efficiently.
If it's for heating, you definitely don't want to size the system based on the output of your existing heating system - especially if you have improved the insulation.
You might want to look at ACCA Standard 5 which is the Quality Control manual.
But at some point it's going to come down to how much you trust the contractor and keep in mind that you have to consider all the elements of the system.
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