Slightly Off the Mark

My son-in-law Vince replaced our malfunctioning toilet with a brand new one tonight, for which I'm very grateful (as you might imagine).

On a related note, there's an election coming up tomorrow. Ordinarily, in mid-term elections the party occupying the White House does badly. I have a feeling, though, that this time around the Democrats are going to do pretty well on a national level. That's not a hope or an offer to debate, just a semi-educated guess.

Whether you prefer the toilet or the urinal, please get out there to vote. Political offices are like toilets: They should be flushed often, or they'll start to stink. And no, it doesn't matter if they're number one or number two.

 

Looks like the Congressional Lavatory got another renovation.

 

Well, it's been four days since Emily had knee surgery, I think ... I don't know, I haven't slept since then.

We thought we'd have about four weeks from the time everything was confirmed until the operation, so I made plans to get certain things done in a certain amount of time. Then they had a cancellation, and suddenly we had five days.

Now that I think about it, maybe it was for the best that I didn't have a lot of time to think about it.

Emily had to have her ACL rebuilt. That's in the knee--I'd been telling everyone the ACLU was damaged, which caused some confusion. It turns out the ACL is actually the anterior cruciate ligament, and aren't we glad they shortened that? She also had a tear in the meniscus, which is also in the knee and not something you have with gravy.

We don't know for sure how she damaged her knee. Yes, it's possible all the hopping on and off horses at her job is connected, but sometimes it's the smallest thing. I once pulled a back muscle while hopping over a puddle, not that I'll ever admit it.

The out-patient thing sounded great. Who wants to be in the hospital longer than they have to? Of course, it also means someone at home had to do the stuff hospital staffs used to do, and why is everyone looking at me?

I'm doing--eh--okay, as a nurse. At least I did once we got her up the steps and inside the house, which required the help of two police officers, one friend, and a husband with a bad back. The friend then prepared a meal for Emily, who hadn't eaten in many hours, and me, who had no excuse.

A few other details of the week:

We did stock up on foods I could prepare (e.g., with instructions of five lines or less). My areas of cooking expertise include homemade popcorn; egg sandwiches; and microwaves. She has, thus far, not starved.

Thigh-high stockings can be sexy. Compression stockings are not. Now that I've helped put a pair on, I understand why pantyhose are going out of style.

It took only a few times of lecturing the dog and then having to shove him out of the way before he realized the appearance of a four-legged Emily means he needs to go lay on his bed until we pass.

On a related note, he likes to check up on his humans, and having them sleep in two different rooms drove him crazy. He finally settled on laying in one room, by the doorway to the other.

Our biggest challenge was utilizing the bathroom. Our house was built without plumbing, and eventually someone carved a corner out of the kitchen to make a bathroom. You can literally stand in the middle of it and touch three walls--four, if you lean over the bathtub. The door opens inward, and with it open it's impossible for someone with crutches to get inside at all, let alone reach the toilet.

So I removed the door.

Not as impressive as it sounds--I learned in basic firefighting class how to take a door off its hinges. The dog was very confused, but I didn't think anything of it until the first time I had to go to the bathroom. I felt like I was sitting in a porta-potty with no door on it.

So, that's how our week has gone. The physical therapist/torturer seems to think Emily's doing well, and now that the spinal block has worn off she's getting around. I just changed the dressing, which took five minutes, and helped her get the compression stockings on, which took two hours. We're recovering from that, then I'm going to cook her a great meal. Oh, wait--we're out of frozen pizza.

Well, then ... an okay meal.

 I have a philosophical question.

Okay, not a heavily philosophical question. On some days, I can't even pronounce philosophical. Sometimes I can't get past "phil". Besides, it's actually more of a horticultural question.

Two lilac bushes have grown behind our house since I bought the property, some thirty years ago--and they weren't young then. I love the scent of lilacs, and seeing them bloom is another sign that winter is over.

You know, I may have a photo of how they used to look. Hold on ...

You have to look behind me to see the ... okay, I couldn't find an old photo on my computer, and I'm too lazy to go looking. Anyway, you can see they were pretty healthy bushes, verging on trees. But now? Now they're older, and I've been pruning off dead branches for years. Despite that, I didn't notice until a couple of years ago that different bushes and trees were growing up among them, no doubt planted by various birds and small animals in the course of them, um, relieving themselves. Last fall I finally went through and (I thought) trimmed out everything that wasn't lilac, leaving a handful of sickly leftovers that I hoped would come back strong.

This spring something did indeed come back strong, but it wasn't the lilacs. I'd completely missed two trees that were growing up among the lilac bushes. I took this photo of them in poor light, then tried to correct the photos in an equally poor way, but this gives you an idea of what they were like when they blossomed:

The darker foliage you see below them are the original lilac bushes, which bloomed at about the same time. They're greatly reduced but still going, as is the small white lilac bush we planted further to the right a few years ago.

But one of them has to go.

So here's my question to you, the plant experts/amateur/armchair growy-persons. Which ones should go? I'd rather have the lilacs, honestly, but those other trees are bigger at this point (and too big to transplant). Should I give up on the lilacs? Or try to transplant some of them? Heck, for all I know those new trees are invasive, or poisonous, or dropped here by Martians to take over Earth plants. Any opinions?

 Don't be afraid to upset me: My bark is worse than my bite. (Get it? Never mind.)

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We had an unusually cool spring, so maybe the problem didn't start with the first heat wave of the year, but that's sure when we noticed it: Our big window air conditioner blew air just fine, but that air wasn't conditioned.

If these things don't happen at the worst possible time, they're at least discovered then.

I can't complain, because the air conditioner came with the house--which I bought thirty years ago. In fact, we did an internet search for the model, Sears Coldspot, and learned they stopped making it in the 70s. Our air conditioner had actually survived over forty Indiana summers, and that's remarkable.

I was still in my teens when that thing was made! I wish I'd held up nearly as well.

One final indignity: The box for the new air conditioner ended up on the old air conditioner.

My house doesn't have central air, or central anything. I suppose we could pump cold water through the hot water radiators and cool the house that way, but ... say, maybe that's something to try. Although the furnace is also over forty years old, so best leave well enough alone.

The air conditioner was set into a window, at one corner of the house. But it was powerful enough to cool the entire downstairs, as long as you set up three fans to blow the air from room to room, in a windy circle that ended with the kitchen air being pumped right back to the conditioner. If you set it up just right, walking through a room can feel like being Jim Cantore reporting for The Weather Channel.

The upstairs is on its own. We bought a small unit for the bedroom, and left the smaller room upstairs to swelter in the summer. We use it as a backup fridge in the winter. Old house problems.

When the downstairs air conditioner, which had its own electrical shutoff and a special plug, stopped cooling the house, Emily went outside and laid her hand against the side of it. Then she came back inside and placed her hand in a stream of cold water until the burning stopped.

Yes, there was definitely something wrong, of the "play Taps at its grave" variety.

Anyone who knows my history will not be surprised to find I'd been saving up for the next big home repair job. After that, it was a simple process of taking the old air conditioner out and replacing it.

It's usually when the word "simple" appears that we run into trouble.

The old unit had been permanently installed in that #@%& window. It had been screwed, hammered, molded, glued, foam-sprayed, and caulked into place. It was as if in addition to stopping air leaks, they wanted to stop burglaries, alien invasions, and Godzilla.

Eventually we freed it, using two screwdrivers, a hammer, chisel, crowbar, power saw, and two sticks of dynamite. (Luckily it was close enough to Independence Day that nobody noticed the noise.) Preparing to install the new air conditioner, I tried to raise the window further.

The window wouldn't raise. It wouldn't raise because it had been installed at the same time as the air conditioner, and was fitted to its exact specifications.

The new unit did not, of course, meet those specifications. But you knew that.

That wrapping on the new air conditioner contains ... a remote control. Unless both my legs are broken, I have no idea when I'd use it.

Keep in mind that Emily and I were doing this work on a day when the temperature was 88 degrees (at 6 p.m.) and the humidity was 107%. How this is possible I don't know, but after an hour we looked like we'd stepped into a shower fully clothed. Oddly enough, the dog didn't seem at all bothered by this--if anything, he seemed happy to have a new window to look out of.

When we finished, I left the pried out metal, the hunks of insulation and piles of screws, the broken drill bits, right where they fell, and simply taped over the areas the new unit didn't cover. Then I tried to plug it in.

Which wouldn't work. The new unit didn't have a special plug.

Some things you should check first. Luckily, there was a more normal plug a few feet on the other side; we turned the new unit on and went out to get a pizza while it was working.

No way were we cooking inside that house. I mean, any more than we already had.

So ... kind of a sucky week.

Actually, all of July kind of sucked, and the first few days of August just went along with it. Come to think of it, 2017 as a whole hasn't exactly been stellar.

But never mind that, let's go to the lawn mower. I never did get this out on all my social media, so you might not have seen it:

For the record, the tire is not supposed to go that direction.

This is the same mower my stepfather repaired for me after the carburetor crapped out. A carburetor is a ... thing ... that does ... something ... in an engine. According to my wife's research, the carburetors in this particular engine brand are now made out of plastic. Plastic in a piece of equipment that's designed to burn stuff under pressure. Yeah.

Now, this would be the same mower that gave me other problems, including a gas cap that wouldn't stay on and other small pieces that seemed to fall off at random. In addition, the little bar that stops the mower from running if you release the handle kept it from starting at all, until I bent the control wire in an un-designed direction. In retrospect, I should have known it was a lemon from the get-go, but it didn't become clear to me until after the warranty ran out.

And now there I was, pushing the mower across the yard, when suddenly the cut became uneven. It became uneven because one of the tires came off. And it wasn't just the tire: The whole assembly that held the tire to the mower deck just peeled away, like wet cardboard.

(I checked: It wasn't wet cardboard. It was metal that looked like web cardboard.)

So, for the second time, I didn't get to finish. I showed the above photo to my wife, and began my prepared speech, which was to be, "If you want to have someone fix it, that's fine, but you've got one week to get it done before I trash this piece of--"

I didn't get beyond "If you want" before she said, "Oh, we're getting rid of that thing."

My wife is a consummate researcher. It's because of her that I know about plastic carburetors, and what "consummate" means. It's in the dictionary. Who knew? Within days she narrowed down the new mowers, and then we went shopping.

For years I avoided mowers with grass catchers, because they fill up after about two passes. It took longer to mow a lawn than it does for me to assemble furniture, and I don't have that kind of time. But now we have a compost heap, which loves grass clippings, so Emily found a mower that could change between a rear bagger and a side discharge. Not only that, but it has four working wheels, and a three year warranty. Heaven in the grass.

It only took me a few hours to get it put together. And I needed to get on it, because the last two times I mowed, only about a third got done before disaster struck. It had been so long that the part already mowed needed it again, and that's where I started--a flat section, where I could get used to the new equipment.

I was being careful, you see.

But I didn't take something into consideration. I accounted for the new mower,  but not the extra weight of the bag filling up. So, when I went to turn a corner on a hill, the mower zigged and my spine zagged.

I'd mowed a third of the lawn--the same third I mowed last time--before my lower back went "twang!"

It didn't sound exactly like that, of course, but that's kind of how it felt. And that's why I didn't go online much for awhile: It hurt to type. It hurt to walk, sit, lay down, lift a finger, swallow, think ... well, it hurt to think about the pain, anyway. It hurt so much that I came to appreciate my  chronic back pain. Sure, that hurt all the time too, but it didn't feel like the red hot barbed tridents they use in Hell.

But my wife, through experience, has become a very good nurse. Three days later I was able to go back to work, and if you ask me I did a pretty good job of hiding the fact that my pain had only been reduced to agony status.

What have I learned from this, you ask? Well, first, always keep some of the good pain pills around the house. More important, either get a goat, or hire someone to mow your lawn. I'm leaning toward that last--I can only imagine how badly I'd get hurt dealing with a goat.

When I opened my Blogger account this morning, I found that all my visitor stats had disappeared. (They popped back into existence a few hours later, having apparently undergone some kind of existential crisis. I've been there.)

One would be tempted to blame Blogger, or the internet in general. However, in the last two days I've broken a brand new pipe wrench, a washing machine, a copper water pipe, a vent hood, my back, and the entire water supply to my house. Can't speak for the new water heater: I haven't advanced to the point of igniting the pilot.

So for the moment I'm not prepared to blame anyone else for stuff going wrong in my  vicinity.

On an all-too-related note, you might not be hearing from me for a few days.

The short version is, a sinkhole opened up in my back yard. More disturbing, it was only a few feet from the side of my house.

Not to worry, though—it was just a small sinkhole. At least, until I got too close and my foot went through, making it a slightly larger small sinkhole.

"Dude, I had nothing to do with this."

There are two things you can do at a time like this: Fill it in, or dig it out. Why dig it out? Why, to find out why, and what; it’s called curiosity, people. Get some.

Also, there’s the fact that I still have a pile of broken brick bits from when I demolished my chimney, which actually stood about ten feet away. So I had a pile of something I needed to get rid of … and a hole. But what was the hole? Cue me, with a shovel.

The hole, I now believe, was a cesspit. That’s a temporary collection tank that looks similar to a well, except you do not want to dip a bucket into it. It’s designed to collect … um … stuff, from a home’s plumbing. When I was a kid, my dad had to periodically empty one at our rural home; it was about the same distance from that house, and also near the back door. Often they’re not sealed at the bottom, allowing liquid to eventually leach downward, while the … er … solid would build up and occasionally have to be emptied. Emptying is not fun. 

In addition to being the right location and size, it was lined with concrete except for a layer of bricks near the top, and I could see where a pipe once entered it from the direction of the house.

Oh, crap.

And you thought all the cesspits had moved to Washington, D.C.

On a related note, the home’s original outhouse (according to an old fire insurance map) was directly behind our garage, which was a carriage house at the time. The cesspit was further south, and the present sewer line further south still. The guy who dug up the sewer line to replace it missed the cesspit by maybe five feet ... talk about hitting a pothole.

Here’s my theory: Sometime in the past—decades ago—someone filled in the cesspit when they installed indoor plumbing (which they did badly, but that’s another story). Over the years a layer of grass, tree, and bush roots grew over it, but underneath the fill dirt began to settle, causing a cavity. Guess it should have flossed. The impact of me throwing all those bricks down when I demolished the chimney weakened it, which just goes to show how my home maintenance jobs turn into a sitcom-like string of unintended consequences.

This is what happens when I hang upside down to take a photo inside a cesspool. That's the fill dirt on the bottom, and for perspective you can make out a spider on the concrete wall. What it was eating down there, I have no idea.

Out of curiosity—and to free up room for the bitty brick bits—we began shoveling out what turned out to be heavy, wet, mostly clay fill. Yes, sometimes items are found in cases like this. There’s a whole science behind researching the contents of old outhouses, and garbology is the study of modern garbage; the phrase was coined by a guy going through Bob Dylan’s trash. I didn’t expect to find anything valuable, but I did expect to find something, such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle we found buried in the old back yard sandbox.

A toy. Not a real turtle. Sheesh.

The thingy from the hole. Which, ironically, is the title of my new book.

First came a flowerpot, potting soil still inside. It was plastic, which dates the fill period to … sometime after they started making plastic flowerpots. Then came a really interesting item: Kind of a spool, possibly ceramic, with a hole through the middle. I’m thinking it’s a hollow ceramic spool. I’d guess it’s manufactured by a company called Superior, based on its markings, which say “Superior”.

 Call me Sherlock.

(After writing that, I sat down to do some research, code-named “Google”. It appears to be a ceramic insulator bushing spacer. I was so close! And get this: I found those things on sale on Etsy for seven and a half bucks. “Vintage Home Décor”, they call it.)

Now I just have to decide if I want to shovel out any more of that cesspit, which was more fun than watching politics on TV but all-too-similar. Maybe, as in politics, there's free stuff down there that was actually paid for by someone else.

Or maybe I can just keep digging, and start a survivalist bunker. That would fit the theme of everything going into the crapper.

The hole's covered on the left, with my new dirt pile on the right. Off to the far right you can see my "new" flowerpot.

I had to exchange the plug on my old dryer with the plug on my new one, which I bought for $25 at my mom's church. In other words, electrical work. There were plenty of online guides on how to do it, but here's the rub: They all explained how to replace a three point plug with a four point plug. But the dryer I bought is actually older than the one it's replacing -- I had to replace the newer plug with the older plug, not the other way around.

Very, very carefully, I took the old new plug apart, matched it with the connections on the new old plug, and put them together exactly as the old new one had been put in when it was new, not old. I double and triple checked, and then, making sure not to touch the dryer or any metal as I did so, I plugged the unit back in.

No sparks, explosion, fire. No singed mustache.Happy and incredulous after only a few hour's of work, I turned the dryer on to make sure it would actually dry stuff.

Nothing happened.

No power. No idea why.

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

In honor of my son-in-law coming over to replace the toilet in my house—as far as I know, the old one was original equipment—here’s the story from a few months back, about what happened that led to its retirement.

The best possible advice about home improvement comes in two simple words:

Call. A. Professional.

Okay, that’s three words. I screwed it up, just as I screw up every attempt to fix my home’s ancient and decrepit pluming. It’s a story old as time, just like my house.

I used to be smart about it. I used to rent. Sure, there was the possibility of an uncaring landlord who wouldn’t fix something, but at least it was on them, and not me.

But nooooo …. I had to buy a house.

My first attempt at home repair was to replace a leaky trap underneath my kitchen sink. A trap is the little curvy thing that keeps sewer gases from coming up, and also serves as the last line of defense against permanently lost wedding rings. My trap was of metal made in the 18 something’s, which was now no line of anything.

I didn’t know plumbing metal could get brittle. When I couldn’t get the couplings to turn, I hooked on a wrench and gave it a good, hard pull. The trap exploded in my face. It was a trap!

That’s not a metaphor—it literally exploded in my face. You’d think, after rinsing out my eyes and bandaging the cuts, I would have recognized that as a sign. But without money to pay a professional I persevered, which is to say continued failing.

Fast forward 23 years.

A faint sound coming from the toilet turned out to be a small leak of water, constantly going down the drain. There are far worse places the water could go, but it was still a waste. I looked into the back of the toilet, where all the fun innards are, and realized the easiest way to fix the problem would be to just take all the mechanical stuff out and replace it in one piece.

The very definition of “it seemed like a good idea at the time”.

At the store, I found exactly what was needed: the whole thingamajig, almost totally assembled and ready to be plugged right in. It even said on the box the two most important things you want to read: “Fits all toilets”, and “easy installation”. It could be installed in minutes, the packaging explained, which I automatically expanded to hours.

My wife checked the first aid kit and retreated to a safe position that was close enough to hear cries of pain. In truth, she’s better at this stuff than I am once she’s tried it the first time, but this particular job she hadn’t done before. I should have just left it to her, anyway.

At first the dog, who wasn’t around last time this happened, followed me around with wagging tail. After the first hour of hearing me talk to myself and read instructions out loud Bae continued to follow me, but kept his distance and wore a puzzled expression.

The first thing you should do is turn off the water to the toilet. Modern toilet installations have a valve you can turn. Mine was installed in the early 1900’s by a blind kid and two drunken monkeys. All untrained.

After some searching in the basement, it became clear I’d have to turn off all the water in the house, and fortunately there is a valve for that. Afterwards I marched back upstairs, emptied the toilet, and watched it fill up again.

Another trip downstairs. Yes, the main water line was turned off. Maybe it was water still in the lines? I opened a downstairs tap. Nothing came out. Upstairs, I flushed the toilet. It began filling again.

Another trip downstairs. Carefully following the maze of piping revealed that there was a way to isolate the toilet after all, by turning two different valves. Unfortunately, that shut off water to the furnace, which uses hot water radiators to heat the house; the water was back-feeding from the radiators into the toilet. Apparently it never occurred to the two drunken monkeys that the toilet might need to be fixed during winter.

An hour in, and the new packaging had not yet been opened.

You have to reach under the back of the toilet and unscrew stuff to take the internal fixtures out, something I didn’t know until after opening the instructions. The day before I’d hurt my back shoveling snow, so curling up on the floor of my miniscule bathroom was a new adventure in pain. (It was at about this time that the dog started keeping its distance.)

Still, removing the old stuff turned out to be easy once I figured out how. The biggest problem was that all the water in the back didn’t drain out until I disconnected the water line, then it all came out at once. Not to worry: I always have a stack of towels waiting. Better water than blood.

Then I took a closer look at the instructions for the “easy” installment of my new whatchamacallit:

There were nineteen steps. Nineteen.

And get this: The stuff that was all together, so that all I had to do was put it in? It had to be taken apart first. Yeah. There were three individual whojamadiggys in the package, and one was a little setup of two washers, and two plastic nuts, already connected to a long, curved plastic … thing. They all had to be separated. One rubber washer turned out to be two washers, which were apparently made one inside the other to save money. It didn’t say how to separate them. By then I was ready to use a chain saw.

Next week: It gets worse.