One year ago today: September 28, 2018, a difficult three months.
Five years ago today: September 28, 2014, WIP
Nine years ago today: September 28, 2010, hash in a can.
Random years ago today: September 28, 2009, “I must learn to sing.”
Several more spots of good luck, in this instance the result of forward thinking, made my morning. Despite fatigue (see addendum) I was out there for you, yeow, ouch, dam, ouch! What a champ. I killed four wasps nests that decided my old laundry room was an excellent place colonize. No, I didn’t take photos. I like you folks, but that doesn’t extend to killer bees and such. Maybe tomorrow when they are dead. Today I zapped them from twenty feet back. Roaches and wasps, second only to mosquitoes in the evolutionary path to uselessness.
Let’s get back to the luck. I found the feed pipe for the (projected) new water heater. I had left a piece of floorboard held in by two screws last year just in case. Less than 1-1/2” underground, I located both the pipe and the single pipe joint needing replacing to get this happening. A day’s work for me that will save a week. The second bit of luck is that slack I left in the old dryer wiring. Code said maybe 18”, but I left four times that. Good move, it will swing in a single operation over to the north wall. As soon as the wasps are, like, dead.
The plumbing is exposed and ready, but I’m in doubt. The only way to run the drain without cutting iron pipe is to have the water flow around a 180° bend. I can’t find anything in all the books I have that addresses this. All the existing pipes run away from the wall. Since it is just wash water, I’m inclined to proceed at a speed of 1/4” per foot. Get it? A little plumbing humor there. Come on, what kind of blog supplier would I be if I don’t get you a picture of that pipe? Hang on.
I’m still following the audio book, “Saving the World”, but my car time is limited when I’m in town. It isn’t picking up the pace, but we have the Spanish ship setting sail again, this time for Puerto Rico. I was right, the other half of the tale is a 1990s style we’re all in this together ploy. The same warmed-over casual references to AIDS like it was just another disease that we should all be spending money to fix. The neighbor, who is blind and dying, has a son that was a medic in the Marines. This one could turn into assisted suicide. Our protagonist’s husband is in a project in Puerto Rico, where he has met some sexpot called Star Belle.
There are actually three or four women in this part of the story. Our authoress, the protest marcher, the dying old lady, and the publishing manager. In this book, men do not play any important roles. The scary part is what these women talk about constantly. It’s like listening to a bunch of sixth-graders in the playground. It takes a while to grasp that this book is serious about what old women talk about. Oh, have you seen Mickey, he looked at you, I think he likes you, blah blah. Chapter after chapter. These are the dames that complain men never grow up. Damn it lady, jump his bones and get it over with. You ain’t getting’ any younger.
Original line dance.
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Renovations have that neat quality that some days cannot go as planned. Let me find you a picture as boring as that audio tape. Here we go. A piece of plywood. This is my new bathroom floor, sort of. Pressure treated 3/4”, not tongue & groove. It was still wet and heavy, so it’s getting a tan. We would have dryer service today had I not discovered there was a least a fifth and possibly sixth wasp nest, same part of the wall. I want the old metal box for the new location and it seems they’ve gotten right in behind it. This life form knows where to bite, got me right on the knuckle. Breed and bite, having no other purpose not better served by other species. Did I just describe the liberals? They are difficult to eradicate.
Back to the plumbing, it took a little creative thought, but I may be able to get enough slope without cutting iron or wood. Think like water in a pipe. See that u-trap? Now see that gap between the two ports on the trap? If you ask me, that was made to fit under a joist and come back up on the other side. Agreed? Good, then return tomorrow to see if I get anywhere with that. While I’m under there, I’m going to run the extra 20 feet of pipe over to where one day I might relocate the kitchen taps. So one can see out the window while having lunch, instead of only when washing dishes. It means cutting away and discarding some of the PVC I spent so much time learning on. But hey, that’s the good thing about plastic.
I worked until dusk and got most of the plumbing dry-fitted. It looks good. Once more, there are questions not answered by the experts. Like do all drains have to be vertical, or is 80° close enough? Or how about a 1-1/2” offset at the bottom of a four-foot pipe? For this reason, I’m going to bury the new pipes behind drywall. That means yet another day with no bathroom floor. Don’t panic, I throw a sheet of plywood over it at night that works just fine. I also remembered the last time I removed a metal pipe joint, the threads busted off inside. Threaded pipe is not meant to be tapped into. But I think I’m going to try.
ADDENDUM
I burned a barrel of wood scraps. It works fine, as long as you keep the fire small, around campfire size. Those concrete blocks for the floor got used up building a base for the barrel. That was before dawn this morning, which kind of let me know I need a whole day off. I feel like I just worked a week on the farm. That sounds funny if by farm it brings up the picture of a tractor with an air conditioned cab and stereo. Let me tell you a little about farm life when I was a kid. First, this is not the 1930s I’m talking about. Farming had become mechanized long before I was born. It was some people’s cute idea of farming that took a lot longer to drown.
Most of what I’m going to say I did not see first hand, but I heard about it. The idea of farming as a community was real before the First World War. Farmers produced most of their own food, growing only enough surplus to make the farm payments. Most of the work was dirty, smelly, and sweaty. The community had to exist because if you wanted even a single day off, you had to rely on somebody to milk the cows. Under these circumstances, a tractor was a luxury because it didn’t need feeding every day.
This all changed when the war started and the government guaranteed they would buy all the wheat farmers could grow. And pay, if I recall, something like $2 a bushel. This meant some dumbass farmer with a section planted in wheat could rake in fifteen times as much money by not planting anything else. The snag was this windfall descended on communities geared to manual labor, that is, doing everything the hard way. It took teams of men to harvest that much grain, so where the farm hand used to get five buckets of water from the well, now he had to get fifty. Like animals, men had to be fed every day.
Only machines could keep up with the demand, but those early machines were dangerous and were fed by hand. I remember seeing them on display at museums, with the tractor connected to the thresher with a belt and flywheel. Long before I was born, almost the entire community concept was gone. Everybody had switched to cash crops and bought what they needed with money instead of by trade. Now, I said almost. There were still people thinking they could make an old-style farm pay. Nope, after the second war, those such farms cost money, they never made any. And there was only one source of free labor left.
Now you know that I know what I’m saying when I say I feel like I just worked a week. When you work that much, it can take another week to get back—and even then it’s like you never quite get all the way.
