An Adventure of a Plumbing Nature

Yesterday afternoon, my kitchen sink clogged up.  Naturally, this occurred just as dinner preparations were commencing.  Call me old-fashioned, but I find that a sink that drains is quite helpful when preparing, cooking, and cleaning up after a meal.

Have I mentioned before that we don't really consider ourselves handy people?

What we do consider ourselves are people who can make lists for handy people.  And people who can write the necessary checks to pay said handy people.  But handy ourselves?  Not so much.

What follows is the internal thought process that took place:

"Jack's not going to be happy about this."
"He's going to think I've been stuffing vegetable peels down the disposal."
"Now we're going to have to call our handy people."
"When the handy people come, we are going to have to have them here for the whole day."
"That means I'm going to have to make a list of things for them to do all day."
"I don't want them to come tomorrow."
"I'm not ready for them to come and spend a whole day in my house."
"I wanted to go to Nordstom tomorrow and use my gift card."
"I'll have to go to Lowe's at least once, if not two or three times, to get necessary supplies for the handy people."
"I bet I'm going to get reminded about not putting vegetable peels down the disposal."
"I wonder if I can blame this on one of the kids?"

At this point I noticed that the other side of the double sink was draining.  I said to myself, "Self, that side is draining.  Hmmm, that must mean there's a clog somewhere above where those two pipes intersect."  (Or something to that effect.)

I gave myself the "you're a smart woman and you can figure this out" pep talk, and informed my eldest and partner-in-stuffing-things-down-the-disposal-crimes that we would not, in fact, be reading library books after dinner, but would instead embark on a plumbing adventure.

So when The Man arrived home from his day at the office, saw the standing water in the sink, and asked about it in a possibly-not-so-happy-tone, I responded with great optimism that The Boy and I were going to fix it after dinner.  He may or may not have been skeptical.

Boy Number Two decided he wanted in on the plumbing action, and not being one to turn down free help, I readily agreed.  We set to work.

Step One: Pull everything (except for the hefty water filter tank) out from under the sink.
Step Two:  Get emergency towels at the ready, along with an empty laundry basket to place emergency towels in.  (I don't think that's an official plumbing step, but I was just trying to cover all my bases.)
Step Three:  Turn off the water under the sink.  (That is an official step, and an important one.)

Now at this point, I was in uncharted territory.  I knew we/I would have to do some disconnecting of pipes and such, and I just hoped it wouldn't be too big a deal.  (I was having visions of having to call a real plumber at 8pm because I created a kitchen disaster.)  Well, without getting into lots of pipe jargon and plumbing speak (because I don't know any of that anyway), I began unscrewing the joints around the bottom bend/elbow piece (trap?).  (Who knew that each joint had its own little PVC screwy thing holding it together?  How convenient is that?  I didn't even need tools.)  When I took that off, no water came out, confirming that, yes indeed, Virginia, there was a clog in there.  I proceeded to unscrew the PVC section going up to the disposal, and lo and behold, carrot peels.  Lots and lots of carrot peels.

My plumber's helper and I dug out the offending peels and, with a gush into the waiting plastic bin - presto, chango - no more clog and an empty sink.  My helpers fetched the plumber's tape, I wrapped it around the threads, reattached the fittings, and, voilà, clogged fixed.  It took all of twenty minutes.

I even fixed the handles on the upstairs bathtub faucets that have been backwards for months.  The hot now properly indicates hot, and the cold - well, you know.  That took less than a minute.

I feel like a plumbing genius.

There's a reason I'm so tired today

Oh my, it's been a while since I blogged.  Undoubtedly, I've had plenty of blog-worthy thoughts, but I suppose between cooking, cleaning, the occasional attempt at homeschooling, and procrastinating on the Internet in order to keep from doing really worthwhile things, I just never got around to it.  And now it would be too much of a mental exercise to think back over the past month and come up with a recap.  So I'll just begin with where I am today.  Which is tired.

I stayed up way too late Sunday night finishing Francine River's book, A Voice In the Wind, at the recommendation of my mother-in-law (she recommended the book, not the staying up late).  It took me a few chapters to get into it.  It's set in the world surrounding ancient Rome and everyone has those long, hard to remember names, but once I got into it, it was a gripping read.  Also, fairly gory.  A depiction of a coarse culture, in some ways not unlike our own today (God have mercy on us), and yet I couldn't didn't want to stop reading.  And so I persevered to the bitter, cliff-hanging end.  And woke up on Monday morning tired, put the next one in the series on hold at the library, and thought, "I'll get a good night sleep tonight to make up for it."

Was it Benjamin Franklin that said, "Don't count your hours of sleep before they hatch?"

Because when "tonight" arrived, around 1 am, we were awakened to the delightful howls of a vomiting now-six-year-old (oh, yeah, that's one of the things we've done over the last month and a half - had one of two birthdays).  Oh, joy.  And so I spent the rest of the night dozing on the lower bunk - which, BTW, I had to make at 1:30 in the sweet middle of the night since I washed the sheets, oh, I don't know, two weeks before and hadn't put them back on yet.  Every 30 minutes or so, I was jolted awake by his "noises" (I was going to say "heaving" but feel like I'm starting to run the whole vomit story into the ground) until about 4 am, at which point he seemed to settle down for a bit, and is now, after a morning of childrens' television, asleep on the sofa with one of Jack's giant Cool Whip bowls beside him.  (I wonder if he'll still want to use that one for his raisin bran, or if we'll have to trash it?  He's pretty partial to his Cool Whip bowls.  And his raisin bran.)

So now, before the dinner prep begins (and does anyone else besides me get tired of having to feed people three times a day?), I should get something productive done.  Wouldn't that be refreshing?

Here's hoping there's a good night of sleep ahead of me tonight.  Sweet dreams.