Personality

Life would be pretty dull if all our personalities were the same. Deb and I have commented on that many times. If we were like each other, we would probably drive each other nuts. As it turns out, the differences in our personalities add spice to our family. Many of those differences complement each other. It's the way God designed us. Opposites attract, and that's a good thing.

Personality differences can also be a source of strife. Statistics abound on the number of marriages split apart because of differences in how finances are handled, how each side communicates, and where the toothpaste tube gets squished, to name a few examples. Part of being married is discovering how to manage those differences.

In twenty-plus years of marriage, I have learned a lot about my better half. I have learned especially (and I am still learning) that God designed her to be her and not a carbon copy of me. It would be so much easier during a discussion or disagreement if she would just change her views and see things my way. After all, that's the right way ... right? But it doesn't work that way. She is who she is for a reason, and part of my job as a husband is discovering what that reason is, if she doesn't just come right out and tell me.

Deb is the linear-thinking worrier of the family. She is always thinking of contingencies and worst-case scenarios for every situation. If there are no contingencies or worst-case scenarios, she will invent one. If one of the boys climbs a tree, she is already planning the trip to the hospital, holding a child with every bone in his body broken. I am the random-thinking free-spirit of the family. I am always thinking of ... whatever. If I wasn't in the tree with my son, I would be pointing out which limbs could be used as good hand holds.

Now throw a couple kids into this personality mix. Stir well, then let stand. The result can be highly entertaining. The two kids that we have are definitely a blend of our personalities, but blended together in ways that can be surprising but are definitely unique.

Deb and Josh share the linear-thinking, task-oriented, driven personality. This similarity has prompted Deb to state many times in earlier years, "I could NEVER teach my own son. We're too much alike. We would drive each other crazy!" Now that we're homeschooling him, to some extent, that's true. Things are working, though. We're just learning what lines to draw and where. Deb doesn't teach math. We have a self-directed curriculum and I handle any questions or problems he may have.

Josh inherited my fascination with all things technical as well as my tendency to drift off topic if there's something more interesting to be explored. The latest issue of Popular Science is usually way more captivating than geometry or American Government.

One of the blessings of home schooling is the opportunity to celebrate and encourage those personality differences, and not to suppress them. Josh, when he is on task, excels at diving into the task and working steadily at it. David is more relationship-oriented and would rather spend time bantering with someone. And so the approach to teaching each of them is also going to be different and we as parents have to take this into account.

When helping out with their math, for example, I will naturally fall into a more logical explanation with Josh. If A then B then C. That's the way he is wired. Whether it's working through an algebra equation or a geometry proof, the logical progression works best. When we arrive at the logical conclusion, then he gets it and is good with it.

With David, the logic is still there, since math is inherently logical, but we will do things in a more back and forth, bantering manner. Story problems are especially good bait for this. They are usually some artificially contrived scenario with little basis in reality. The fun comes in exposing how ridiculous they really are while still benefiting from the underlying math practice. Who cares if Susan goes twice as fast as Jane in the opposite direction. One of them is going the wrong way.

Although much of the subject matter is the same, allowing the kids to express themselves in different ways when studying has helped keep their interest. Josh enjoys doing his reading and studying in the big easy chair by the window, David will be on the floor or at the kitchen table. We have figured out that some subjects work better in the morning, and Fridays are good for field trips and volunteering. David likes manipulatives. A wad of Silly Putty accompanies most lessons, or he will attempt to juggle several apples from the fridge while talking to Deb in the kitchen about his work. Josh complains about the bruises on the apples as a result of this juggling practice.

Other families may do things quite differently than ours, because the mix of personalities is different, but we do enjoy the flexibility of tailoring our schooling and our days around our personalities rather than the other way around.

Expanding My Vocabulary

I ran across an interesting word today that I had never seen before. The word appeared in a patent publication that was sent to me via email at work. While the legalese on patents is always a challenge due to the strange usage of the language and somewhat arcane words in use, the word "hydrometeor" stood out for some reason.

I looked up the word "hydrometeor", and one definition stated that it was "A precipitation product, such as rain, snow, fog, or clouds, formed from the condensation of water vapor in the atmosphere." In other words, a hydrometeor is a raindrop or a snowflake, among other things.

We have been having lots of hydrometeors around here lately. A regular hydrometeor shower. Last Friday's storm dropped white hydrometeors to a depth of about six inches. I used the hydrometeorblower to move all the hydrometeors off the driveway. The boys, seeing that this kind of hydrometeor makes for slippery parking lots, hauled out the propellor bike and created huge clouds of hydrometeors until the engine died. It appears that the carburetor is fouled up. Josh was disappointed because the engine died before David's turn was finished.


I now have in my brain two very different types of meteors. A "meteor" is a solid object which, when striking the earth, creates large craters or causes other damage. A "hydrometeor" can hardly be felt when it lands on the tip of your tongue.

There's probably something deeply philosophical in all this somewhere. I just don't see it.

Maybe I'll just get my hydrometeor shoes and do some snow shoeing.

Tomato Tales

This year, as a way for the boys to earn some money, we decided to have them raise tomatoes and sell them by the road. Our neighbor had been doing that for several years, and Josh had helped him the last two years because of the neighbor's failing health. When the neighbor passed away this past winter, his widow offered us the use of his little tomato stand and the use of his garden space for raising tomatoes.

In early May, Deb took the boys shopping. They came home with what they thought was 200 tomato plants. They discovered a little later that they actually had 250 plants. They went to two different places to buy the plants, and one place put more plants in a flat than the other place. So now we had 250 plants in the greenhouse that needed to be kept watered until the danger of frost was past.

Putting out that much money ahead of time, with no guarantee of ever getting it back, was tough on the boys. Sixty bucks is a lot of money, and put a good dent in their spending money. Even so, there were a couple times when the plants in the greenhouse got a little dry from neglect, and I walked in to find their big investment looking very droopy.

All of them survived, however, and soon they had the rather daunting task of planting that many tomato plants. It was a lot of work, and had to be done in a short time, because of a week long vacation we were planning at the end of May. This trip forced us to plant about a week earlier than we would otherwise have planted. Frost is still possible near the end of May, and we watched the weather closely.

The day before we left, the weather forecast included a frost warning. That evening, in addition to packing for a week-long trip, we had to figure out how to save 250 tomato plants from frostbite.

It was well after dark when we finally finished our makeshift protection. We put the sprinklers on the tomatoes in the neighbor's garden, after scrambling to find enough hose, and a large fan hanging from a ladder would hopefully keep the frost from settling on the plants in our garden. This consumed our entire stock of extension cords. The thermometer that I placed in our garden recorded a low of 33 degrees that night. One degree above crop failure.

The next expense came when the plants needed to be staked. We managed to find enough wood to make stakes, but the boys had to buy their own twine. Staking tomatoes consumes enormous amounts of twine, and the big roll they had bought last year when they were selling firewood quickly ran out. They found baler twine at a local farm supply store, and bought about 4 miles of it.

The staking was even more work than the planting. We handled it bit by bit. Stake one or two rows today, one or two tomorrow, a little at a time until, after a couple weeks, the stakes and twine were all up.

At this point, they were having doubts that this venture was worthwhile. They had a lot of hard work and about ninety dollars into it, with nothing to show for it except a large spider web of orange baler twine hanging in the garden. It was wait-and-see time. Keep the plants watered and wait and see if anything happens.

About mid-July the first tomatoes started to ripen. Out of the entire patch, we were getting first one or two per day, then five or six. When we finally had enough for a quart-sized box, we did some fixing up to the stand, which was rather weather-worn, and parked the stand with a single box of tomatoes in the front yard. A sign announced, "Tomatoes, $2.00 per box."

The box was gone within a half hour. In the money box was the first income from the tomato business. Two bucks, in small change. Since the stand was now empty, the boys rolled it back up the driveway and parked it out of the way by the big Forsythia bush.

The next day, there was enough for one more box. Again, they parked the stand by the road with its lone box of tomatoes. Again, the tomatoes disappeared in the first half hour. Four bucks down, eighty-six to go to break-even.

A few days later, there were enough tomatoes for two boxes, which also sold quickly. There were more doubts. Half of the patch planted in the neighbor's garden was showing signs of blight. The scrawny plants probably didn't even need the stakes and twine that surrounded them. Although the plants located in our garden were doing much better, they seemed bent on producing lots of rich foliage and very few tomatoes. One row in particular overgrew the stakes and twine, the plants becoming so large and heavy that they started to pull the stakes over.

But production did continue to increase. As I'm sure anyone who has raised a few tomato plants can attest, once a plant has developed a full head of steam, it seems to want to bury you in tomatoes. We eventually reached that point. One day, we had a couple boxes of tomatoes left over at the end of the day. It seems that we finally saturated the clientele of the neighborhood.

Most of the time, the tomatoes simply disappeared, being replaced by cash in the box, so we never got to meet many of the people who stopped by. We had people leave too much money, too little money, or sometimes no money at all. One person decided to rearrange all the tomatoes in the boxes, taking the best ones for herself, and then mistakenly left a one and a ten-dollar bill in the box. When she didn't come back to claim the extra money, we figured it was the cost of the "premium" tomatoes. Occasionally someone would come up the driveway, needing change or just wanting to talk. One woman in particular told the boys, "I just love your tomatoes. I come about twice a week." It was nice to see that we actually had regular customers.

We had been regularly making deposits into the boys' bank accounts from the tomato sales and from their weekly paper routes, which is also collected in one-dollar bills and small change. We count the cash, make an electronic transfer from our joint checking account, and stow the cash in a safe place. One day we brought it all out onto the kitchen table and counted it all out. A few-hundred dollars in one-dollar bills can look like an enormous amount of money, especially when counted into neat piles on the table. It can also make quite an impact on a child who, just a couple months before, was questioning a ninety dollar investment. Those doubts were now gone and the boys are now convinced that it was well worth the hard work. The bank teller was also amazed when I came in with a large big pile of singles and about ten pounds of change.

A wet, mostly dreary September effectively ended the season. The tomatoes are gone, and so is the income they generated. Having no regular income other than their weekly paper routes, the boys will have to make their savings stretch over the winter. This will be a lesson in restraint, particularly since there will need to be enough left over in the spring to buy next summer's plants. Right now, that seems like eons away.

How To Build a Boat

A few weeks ago, we and another family met together to plan a Cardboard Canoe Regatta. Participants would have two hours to build a canoe entirely out of cardboard and duct tape and then would then compete against other participants for speed and endurance. We drew up a set of rules, chose a date and a location, and then hoped for good weather.

We had no idea how many people would choose to participate. Such events are usually sponsored by youth groups and university engineering departments, but when the day of the event came, we had 7 boats in the Regatta, a very workable number.

We collected a whole bunch of cardboard from a local bike shop, who conveniently held a big sale at that time and so had a lot of cardboard to get rid of. We also had several cartons from some kitchen cabinets. It was quite a pile. It was enough to allow the boys to build and test a prototype canoe a week before the event.

The boys completed their prototype in about two hours and they used every bit of duct tape we had laying around, about a roll and a half. We found out then that all duct tape is not created equal. One partial roll had adhesive about as strong as sticky notes, and would come off as soon as it was applied. They had to reinforce that with some clear packing tape (we can bend the rules when building prototypes).

The prototype performed well, lasting for just over ten minutes. Joshua's end of the boat sank first, after he slowly sank through the sodden cardboard. The boys paddled nearly all the way across the lake at 8th Avenue Park before the boat sank. What a blast. They laughed all the way across the lake.

But 10 minutes was not long enough. They learned that another team built a boat that lasted for 15 minutes. This was the new target.

When the day of the Regatta came, the boys applied what they had learned to their new boat. The made the new boat larger and stronger, and they had two fresh rolls of duct tape, which stuck well and stayed in place.

The boat building time was a flurry of activity, with the pavilion at the park littered with cardboard and busy boat-builders. It was interesting to see all the various design approaches, from precision measuring, cutting, and fitting to slap it together and tape it in place.

Two rolls of duct tape turned out to be quite a bit, and a couple careful boat building teams were able to have enough left over to coat the entire bottom of the boat with tape. This could be a long contest.

The park was practically deserted except for our group, and a local police officer who was patrolling the area expressed surprise at this. He said this park is usually crowded on a summer Saturday.

After the building was done, it was time to launch the boats. We set out a couple milk-jug buoys and instructed the boaters that the first around the buoys and back to shore would win the speed award.

At the starting signal, all seven boats splashed into the water. One sank immediately, the weight of its occupants bursting out the back. The others splashed toward the first buoy.

Josh and David, in the SS Minnow II, pulled ahead right away and made it back to shore in three minutes. I'm not sure if it was the design of the boat or the furious paddling or both that contributed to their speed, but it was a no-contest race.

Over the next half hour, three more boats sank. The SS Tadpole, piloted by our women's team, started to collapse and then capsized, dumping them into the water. They completed the course around the buoys by swimming, towing their wreckage behind them. Another creation took over twenty minutes to sink, and it sank very slowly, probably due the sheer volume of cardboard used in its construction.



After a half hour, there were three boats left: The SS Minnow II, the Endurance, and the Flying Dutchman. Since we were getting hungry by this time, and pizza had been ordered, we opened the contest up to aggression. The boats came quickly together and with a furious splashing of water and people leaping onto other people's boats, all three boats were down within 30 seconds. The Endurance went down last, just a few seconds after the SS Minnow II, and so earned the Endurance Award.

The event ended with an informal awards ceremony where the Shackleton Award (Endurance) and the Amundsen Award (Speed) were handed out. These were trophies made of ... you guessed it ... cardboard and duct tape. It only seemed appropriate.

This was one of those events that will probably warrant a repeat performance; we'll probably do it again next year.

"H" is for Cold

It leaks.

I turned the water on the other day, partly to test my plumbing work and partly because we needed the water in the greenhouse. The joint where the new pipe joins the old began the familiar shimmer around the edge, and then formed a droplet which eventually fell onto the floor in front of the clothes washer. It was soon followed by another, and another; little shimmering dribbles growing, then falling, growing, the falling. It would have been rather hypnotic had it not been so maddening. Of course, I do not have the parts, which will necessitate a fourth trip to Lowe's.

I fixed it temporarily with an empty paint can, hanging it below the pipe to catch the dribbles.

We're big into life skills for the boys and this would have been another opportunity for life skills training. But we've done quite a bit of plumbing and are to the point where perhaps plumbing training is becoming counterproductive. I had David help me put the faucet back on the bathroom sink after we had it re-glazed several weeks ago. I showed him which hoses to hook up where under the sink and he worked at it for a while, looking like a plumber. Only the bottom half of him was visible, sticking out from under the sink and I could hear the clanking of wrenches and pliers.

When he emerged, I asked him if he trusted his work enough to turn the water on. He just grinned.

I ducked under the sink to make sure the drain was all tightened down and noticed something amiss.

"David!" I exclaimed, "Did you realize that you got the hot and cold water pipes backwards?"

His grin just got a little bigger. "Rats!" he said, with a twinkle in his eye. "You weren't supposed to notice this soon!" He was hoping it would go unnoticed until someone (usually Deb) turned on the hot water, waiting for it to warm up. It would have been a long wait.

When your son starts sabotaging the plumbing, then it's time to end the training. He can learn in the school of hard knocks once he gets his own home. Then we'll see what kind of water comes out when you turn the handle marked "H".

Purple and Happy

"Use only in a well-ventilated area."

Yeah, right. The instructions on the can don't take into account that most plumbing is in basements, or close crawl spaces. This latest plumbing job was to replace a faucet that I temporarily repaired last fall by simply screwing another valve onto the end of it. My makeshift fix froze over the winter and split. This was another one of those I-Hate-Plumbing jobs.

This time, I was going to do it right. I paid the big bucks for one of those freeze proof faucets. Armed with my newest purchase, a flashlight, and a hack saw, I wormed into the crawl space under the family room to where last year's twisted pipe was. It took some pretty good bodily twisting to actually get the saw onto the section of pipe that needed to be cut, but I managed to start the cut... and got water and copper shavings dribbled onto my face.

This is part of the job, I told myself, and kept going. Eventually, the pipe was free. I wormed out of the crawl space, pulled the old faucet out from the outside, and inserted the new one into the hole in the wall. Back into the crawl space, back into the contorted position so I could reach the tail end of the faucet so I could wrap it with plumber's tape.

I picked up the plastic pipe fitting that mated with the tail of the faucet and saw that it was the wrong size. How typical. This meant another trip to Lowe's to replace a 35 cent part. And it was one of the few parts I didn't have in my large bag of leftover plastic pipe fittings. It seems that every plumbing job requires at least two trips to the hardware store, so this would get the obligatory second trip over with.

I checked out with the same cashier that I had just an hour before. She appeared surprised that I was back so soon, buying another part for 35 cents. Out of my frustration, I didn't offer any explanation.

Back in the crawl space, I now had to thread the new part onto the faucet. This is rather hard to do when both arms are extended over one's head into the floor boards while the rest of the body resembles the fetal position. I managed to get another section of pipe glued into the fitting, and an elbow onto the pipe so now it extended below the floorboards, making the next sections much easier to put on. I only dribbled a little of the purple primer onto my hands and managed to sniff just a little of the Tetrahydrofuran and Methyl Ethyl Ketone and Cyclohexanone contained in the pipe glue. It makes for a rather odiferous crawl space and a rather light-headed plumber.

Only a short section of pipe and a coupling remained between me and another completed plumbing job. The short section of pipe was glued in quickly, but I then discovered that the old section of pipe was just very slightly larger than the fittings allowed. It seems that pipe this old was no longer compatible with today's version.

Oh, the joys of owning an older home. Now I was not only replacing a faucet, I was going to have to replace 40 feet of pipe as well. This resulted in trip number three to Lowe's to get the necessary pipe and fittings. A 1-hour job was now spreading out into 2 complete evenings.

Now, instead of just a couple fittings needing to be glued together, there were more. Elbows, couplings, pipe sections, hangars; all needing to be assembled over my head in close quarters and worked around the other infrastructure: heating ducts, wires, other pipes, etc. And the daubers in the cans of purple primer and glue are really meant for larger parts and so hold far too much for little fittings. My hands were stained purple from the dribbling primer. At least the glue, although it smelleD strongly, wAs thiCker, sO it DIdn't dRip as bAdLY. i tHnk i actUAly fIniishedthe joBbefore i ppasSEdout.. maYbee i'LL turNIton neXtYeartoSeEif itActuaallllly lEAksssssssss.

ihateplumnig

Plumbing

I hate plumbing. Can I say that? I hate plumbing. This necessary evil in most homes drives me nuts. Electrical I can handle, but plumbing drives me around the bend. It's not that I can't do it, I can, and I have done lots of it, but that doesn't endear me to it.

Electrical work is so clean. Nothing gets wet. Nothing leaks slowly. You don't have to join wires together every ten feet and around every corner. There's no such thing as elbows and tee-joints, unless you are running wires in a conduit, in which case you are back to plumbing. If something goes wrong, it just blows a breaker or refuses to work. It doesn't soak the insulation and warp the plywood. It doesn't result in large puddles of electricity on the floor. If something goes REALLY wrong, the resulting fire usually burns pretty clean.

Plumbing projects always last a lot longer than originally estimated. I usually have lots of spare parts on hand from prior projects, but none of them ever fit. The pipe glue for plastic pipe has always dried out by the time I need it. The fancy creation I have made out of pipe to get around an obstruction points the wrong way. All this results in extra trips to the hardware store for more supplies. If I have to dig a trench to lay a pipe outside, there will invariably be large stones just under the grass which stop the shovel with a bone-jarring clank. Just below the stone will be a main sprinkler line that I laid a few years ago that I have forgotten about. This main line is no match for the shovel and I end up shattering a section of the pipe. The sudden flow of water instantly soaks the ground and my clothing and I leave a wet trail through the house as I rush in to shut the well off.

The latest project was an outside water faucet that leaked. Badly. It should have been replaced several years ago, but, as you know by now, I hate plumbing. This year the handle started to strip. When you turned the handle, you were not usually opening the faucet, unless you pushed down at the same time.

Yesterday, it was time to fix it. I needed to spray some weeds and it was difficult to turn the water on to fill the sprayer.

I tried tightening the screw holding the handle on. It broke. Now the faucet has no handle. I dug through my spare parts. I actually found a new faucet that fit. Now the chore was getting the old faucet off.

A couple years ago, after another plumbing project which required me to borrow a pipe wrench, Deb bought me my own pipe wrench. A nice big one. Two feet long. It could double as a boat anchor. Armed with that wrench, I attempted to unscrew the entire faucet from the wall. It turned, but the entire pipe turned with it, making the old caulking around the pipe chip away in large chunks. I wormed my way into the crawl space to clamp the pipe down from the inside.

Back outside to give the faucet another go. This time I could feel the resistance of the clamped pipe. The faucet began to turn. Slowly at first, then all of a sudden easily. Looking at it closely, I could see the pipe was still turning with it.

Back into the crawl space to check on the status of the clamp. It hadn't moved. That could only mean one thing. The section of copper pipe hidden inside the wall had buckled and twisted from the force. Not a good situation. Now a half-hour project was turning into an entire day project. Rebuilding the pipe in those tight quarters was not going to be fun. And any more attempts to turn the faucet would most likely break the pipe.

It's here that my "whatever works" engineering philosophy kicked in. I didn't need a new faucet. I just needed a way to stop the water from flowing. I drove to Lowe's and bought a small shut-off valve with hose fittings, and screwed that onto the end of the faucet. The faucet may not close all the way and have no handle, but it doesn't matter anymore. The three bucks I spent on the in-line shut-off valve saved me an entire evening of work, and probably an equivalent amount in new fittings and pipe sections.

I may have delayed the inevitable, probably having to actually fix it if I ever sell the house, but I saved the time for now (an hour saved is an hour earned!). I actually got the weeds sprayed before it got dark.

The Fun Side of Plumbing ... Again

If you have been reading these posts for more than a year, you may recall one that I wrote last summer. Entitled "The Fun Side of Plumbing", it described one of my attempts to teach my boys life skills. The life skill at that time was plumbing. The laboratory was a slow-draining bathtub, and my two students got to see just how fun plumbing can be.

Since that time, we have had a couple other "plumbing labs", one of them being the same bathtub drain pipe which I finally replaced because of its continuing reluctance to make the bathtub water disappear. This time, the lesson was how the force of habit can interact with home repairs. I disassembled the drain plumbing and then drove to the hardware store for parts. In the mean time, Deb told Josh to take a shower as she always does about this time of day. Halfway through the shower, Deb needed to get something from the basement and discovered it was raining in the basement. Deb ran up and yelled through the door at Josh, who quickly stoppered the drain. This reduced the downpour in the basement to a mere drizzle. When I got home, they were moving all the boys' Lego pieces from the big wet spot in the carpet and had a large bucket catching most of the water. In this case, I didn't think of leaving some sort of reminder in the bathtub because I don't usually use it at that time. Josh wasn't helping me with the drain pipe so he didn't realize it was missing. Once things were dried out we had a good laugh.

We teach these things to our boys because we want them to be able to manage a household of their own someday. Including the plumbing. These life skills include the knowledge of what they can do themselves and when they need to pay for a professional. I sometimes wonder how much of these "life experience" lessons actually stick.

This past Saturday, I found out that these lessons actually do stick. Maybe not all of them, but this one stuck enough to avert a small disaster.

Deb and I went out to run some errands on a Saturday morning, leaving the boys at home. When we arrived home about an hour and a half later, David was waiting anxiously in the driveway.

"What took you so long?" he inquired. We thought it was a little strange that he would wait like this; he usually reads in his room when all his tasks are done.

We vaguely mentioned birthday shopping as his birthday is coming up in a couple weeks. But he seemed to be preoccupied with something else so we finally asked him what was up.

"Water," he said impatiently, "we almost had a flood".

When we came in, the boys were talking through each other in an effort to explain.

They heard a hissing noise in the kitchen, and after checking that the burners on the stove were indeed off, they located the source of the hissing under the sink. By this time the water was starting to run out over the kitchen floor, although most of it was pouring into the basement. A pipe had ruptured and was soaking everything under the sink. Josh tried to stem the tide by wrapping it with duct tape (I think he has seen me fix too many things with duct tape), but discovered that even duct tape has its limitations. It will not hold up to water pressure. Seeing that our sink does not have shut-off valves, Josh had the presence of mind to run downstairs and shut off the main water valve to the house. With Old Faithful now settled back down, they mopped up all the water and cleaned up the kitchen.

By the time we arrived home they had things pretty much back to normal.

I guess you could call this a sort-of "life skills pop quiz", and I am pleased to report that my boys passed this one. This kind of test may have been unexpected but it is far more real-world than a scheduled test in a classroom. Hopefully, when my boys are on their own, they will be better equipped to handle those fun little emergencies than I was. I'm pretty handy, but it was a rude awakening when, three days into the ownership of my first house, the toilet overflowed, and, with lots of gurgling noises, continued to run and run and run...

Me and plumbing, we go WAY back.

The Fun Side of Plumbing

Yesterday we had a night where we actually weren't going anywhere or doing anything. That meant it was time to take care of some things that were on the "urgent" list but somehow keep getting pushed back. One of those was the bathroom plumbing. The tub has been draining slower and slower over the last several weeks until a typical shower would leave water standing in the tub for the next half hour. It does wonders for bathtub rings. I have been able to delay this problem occasionally by a vigorous attack with the plunger, which would bring the drain-time to about five or ten minutes. Then it would gradually slow down again.

Time to teach the kids some life skills.

We located a pipe wrench at the neigbor's house, set up some chairs in the basement to stand on, and went to work.

I had David hold a bucket under the pipe while I removed the hangars from the ceiling and let the pipe down from the tub drain. I told him to keep the bucket under the open end of the pipe while I rotated the vertical section to unscrew it from the large pipe at the wall. As the section of pipe tilted downward, the predictable stream of water poured from the end. Only David had the bucket aimed wrong. Most of the water made it in the bucket, but some of it splashed over his hands and onto the basement floor. With the water came some of the stuff that caused the problem. Thick black tar-like goo that the water carried out in little globs. It didn't smell like roses, either.

David let out a shriek, dropped the bucket, which I managed to catch with my free hand before it hit the floor, and clamped his fingers over his nose. "PEWW!" he yelled. "This is awful!" He then swiftly wiped his other hand all over his clothing.

I held the pipe AND the bucket and let him gather his wits about him. He came back in the room with his shirt pulled up over his nose, making gagging noises as he peered over his shirt collar. Since the pipe came apart in the wrong spot, I had to take another section out. This one required considerable force on the pipe wrench, and the free end of the pipe wiggled around substantially, putting all that black gunk everywhere but in the bucket.

I told the kids we were going to take the sections outside and run the garden hose through them to force the gook out. Josh ran out to the barn to get a hose while I carried the pipes up the stairs.

I was just in the garage when Grandma drove up. She had a stack of books in her arms from the library. Lego books. Josh has a library card, but he has Grandma's library card number memorized. So whenever he gets on the computer to reserve books at the library, he reserves the books using Grandma's library card number.

I'm sure the librarians think we have an interesting Grandma. She checks out a lot of books on Legos, robotics, and birds.

Josh came back from the barn, lugging a garden hose. He saw what Grandma was carrying. The next thing I knew, the garden hose was laying midway through the door in the garage, and Josh had disappeared. I guess drain plumbing and life skills still don't hold a candle to Lego robots. I completed the job by myself.

Maybe next time I'll have Grandma come over with a stack of books on Math problems, or spelling words. Or tell the kids we're going to design a robot to remove black gook from the drain pipes. Or just tell them to grimace and bear it.


P.S. Deb says any bathroom SHE uses in this house doesn't have black gook in the drains.

Tales from the Front Pew, Chapter 9

Josh has a Palm PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). When he was in school, he used it to keep track of test dates, assignments due, etc. It was one attempt to keep him from forgetting everything. Now that he his home schooled, it is used less often. Mostly for playing games on long car trips.

His good friend, Jonathan, from school got a Palm for Christmas. Josh was there for a sleepover recently and the two of them traded Palm programs, beaming them back and forth like some sort of Star Wars communicators. Jonathan found a Bible program. The complete NIV Bible for the Palm. Josh now has it on his Palm. He likes to use it when we're reading Bible verses during family devotions.

A family that sits near us in church has a son, Troy, who is a year older than Josh. Troy saved up his money and bought a Palm PDA. He learned that Josh had a Bible program on his Palm. We sat ahead of Troy in church tonight. Both boys brought their Palms because Troy wanted the Bible program.

So, during the prelude, there the two are, Josh facing the back, both of them holding their Palms aimed at each other over the pew, while the Torah transferred invisibly from one to the other. During the offertory, it was the Kings, Psalms and the minor prophets. The New Testament had to wait until after the service, when Josh, Troy and David huddled over one of the tables in the back to do their beamings. I think they would have beamed stuff back and forth while we were walking out, but they couldn't keep things steady enough.

Normally, we would discourage this sort of thing, but, since it was the Bible that was being transferred, we let it go.