Arrgghh – Plumbing

I had a post prepared, I thought, but as I went through and re-read it, there were several points I wanted to make clearer. While I was pondering on how to do the rewrite my wife said, “I think the floor looks like it’s getting warped from water.”
“I don’t see how. There’s no water in that room.”
“That may be, but something’s going on. I think the dishwasher might be leaking. I don’t want to run it until I know for sure what’s going on.”
My wife usually knows what she is talking about. If she says there’s a problem then there probably is. As I’ve said elsewhere, my wife is the brains of this operation.

Anyway, there was a problem.

I went over to the corner indicated and sure enough, I found evidence of water. It’s still the day before Independence Day and if I can find out what it is and whether I need to call someone it’s going to be a lot cheaper than on the holiday. So I did some tracking down and found the culprit. Years ago, before we bought the house, someone had installed a tank style water softener or filtration system or some such. The main cold water under the kitchen sink ran into it on one side and out the other. I never paid it any mind. The water faucet worked and the water tasted like it should so I left well enough alone.

Well, one of the connections had sprung a pinhole leak and was spraying a small jet of water against the cabinet and seeping through to the other side. It must have been doing this for quite a while to generate as much water as it had but it actually looked to be an “easy” fix.

I use quotation marks around “easy” because it was a very straightforward procedure. Turn off the cold water. Disconnect the thing and remove it. Us the good hose on the good side and connect it back up. I said a little prayer and went to work. The repair actually went fairly smoothly. It’s better to pray in the Lord’s name than take it in vain. The repair was not difficult. Standing back up was a different story. Getting down under a kitchen sink and putzing around in a when you are sixty is not the same as when you were thirty.

There are a lot of times I still feel young and can’t imagine what people are talking about when it comes to getting older. I feel like a young kid in my twenties, sometimes, ready to take on anything. Then there are times when I am unfolding myself from under a kitchen sink and remembering my mother told me there would be days like this. She never told me how many. My knees hurt, my lower back hurts. My middle and upper back hurts. I have some sort of degenerative disc something or other that the VA doctor is going to be working on which causes numbness in my arms, sometimes and sometimes pain in my shoulders.

Then, it was almost eleven o’clock and since I had wound up working all day I came to the realization that I had not made my usual rounds of the blogosphere and that I hadn’t written anything close to legible for you all.

So here it is. If you are celebrating the United States independence, have a safe and happy Fourth of July. I have to go, it’s 11:59 and I don’t want to have to rename this blog Pumpkin Sit.

12 Comments

  1. I see it is independence day in the US today. Happy independence day to you!

    Oh and when I opened the WP reader I found a post on your blog named Reciprocal Blogging. When I clicked on it, it seemed to be incomplete, as it was just two paragraphs, both talking about different things. When I clicked on visit site, it gave a 404 error. Did you delete the post or is there an error?

  2. Well done on the “easy fix”. At 60 it was fairly easy to get down. I found it was the getting up that was the tricky part!

    • Thanks for sharing that link! Yes, it was very much like that. I mean, it’s an inanimate object, I should be able to overcome. It helps explain why my sergeant in the Army often said, “Thiel, you’ve got to be smarter than the inanimate object you’re working on.”

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