Don't Sweat Air Conditioner Problems

I'm rerunning my blog about hot weather from several years ago because, honestly, it's too hot to write.

  

We had an unusually cool spring, but we noticed a problem during the first heat wave of the year: Our big window air conditioner blew air just fine, but that air wasn't conditioned.

I don't know when the problem actually begun. These things are always found at the worst possible time, like when your furnace breaks down during a blizzard, or your sewer backs up during colonoscopy prep.

And I can't complain, because the air conditioner came with the house--which I bought 35 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 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 the thing was huge. 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. In the winter, the smaller room is used as a backup fridge. 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.

At least a fire would have taken care of that ugly wallpaper.

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

Anyone who knows my history will not be surprised to learn I saved 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 top of 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.

Elections and Toilets

 

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.

 

November Mowing Pictures

Just to remind you that this too shall pass, here are some pictures from when the weather was much nicer--in November of last year. Hard to believe anyone would call any part of last year the "good old days", but at least we weren't on the edge of world war. As for weather, I just saw a prediction of a couple of inches of snow for this weekend, which is normal for basketball playoff season.

------------------------------------------------------- 

 

I get such a kick out of mowing the lawn in November. It means I'm not shoveling snow, for one thing. This year I got one last mow in before all the ick began, and I took some pictures along the way because nothing says "safety" like holding onto a roaring lawn mower with one hand while aiming a phone in the other direction.

Lilacs bloom in the spring. Except this year, because this is 2021 and Mother Nature wanted to remind us of what we'll be missing for the next several months.

Most of my fire bush died this year because of another plant that grew up and strangled it--which I didn't notice until the remaining fire bush started to turn color. The part that remained after my slashing massacre seems to be doing okay ... so far.

 

I've never understood why some people hate dandelions. I mean, they're flowers. Those little vines that want to spread everywhere, now those I hate.

Oh, I forgot to mention: growing right with the lilacs were cherries, from a tree I didn't even know was there until late last summer. I'm so bad of this yard thing.

Well, it was nice while it lasted

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Getting a Leg Up On Knee Surgery

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 surgery team got her all fixed up, held us there until we surrendered a major credit card (buy our books!), then sent us home--the same day. They scheduled physical therapy to start two days later, which seemed like a terrible idea and afterward still seems like a terrible idea.

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.

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I Think I Seed a Fruit Tree

 So, remember those two trees that were growing up in the middle of my lilac bushes? I'd pretty much decided to cut them down and try to save the ancient lilacs, but for one last opinion I did some research to determine just what kind of trees they are.

One's a cherry tree. The other is some kind of apple tree, possibly crabapple. I have fruit trees!

The seeds were possibly deposited by birds, as birds will do--we have a lot of birds, what with the bigger trees around our house. There were two cherry trees on the property, but they died out a long time ago--I suppose it's possible they dug up a seed when my sewer line was replaced five or six years back, but that seems like a stretch.

It's hard to tell how long they've been hiding there, growing in the lilacs--I'm not much of a landscaper, and should have been trimming those lilac bushes every year. Now I'm of mixed feelings again, and I've decided to wait until spring to decide which I should keep--I doubt they'll all grow happily together.

The fact that my vacation is over, the chainsaw blade needs sharpened, the weather has turned crappy, and I have no more desire to be outside anyway has nothing to do with it.

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I'm In a Horticultural Wasteland

 

 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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Happy birthday, Emily!

So, it's been a really awful December.

This possibly relates to the fact that it was a really awful November, but December just went right into the sewer, sometimes literally. Illnesses, scheduling problems, weather, blood pressure--which I guess goes with illnesses--and I'm currently in pain because of the previously mentioned sewer (long story).

Anyway, I'm stressed out to the max, which I guess goes with blood pressure, but I've got two things going for me:

One, after December 21st the days start getting longer.

Two, I always know my wife's birthday, because after that the days start getting longer.

That's a cool way to remember a date. There's also calendar phone apps, of course, and on a related note, our wedding anniversary is March 5th.

She's going to kill me for posting this pictures without getting approval first, but--just look at them! They're SO cute!

Emily always knows when I'm feeling down, ill, or stressed, and she usually knows how to help fix me. Beowulf knows all that stuff, too ... I'm the only insensitive person in the house.

But anyway, this post is mainly for Emily:

Even though I usually screw up your birthday by not being prepared. On a related note, I'm not prepared for your birthday. But I'm not too concerned, because I locked up your sword collection.

Emily does not have unlimited patience, but by gosh, she sure has a lot of it. She takes care of me a lot, and if you don't believe me I can show you the scars, and she also takes care of the dog and a lot of other problems, not that the dog and I are problems except for when we are.

So here's to Emily, who deserves to live in a way warmer place, but all I can do is turn up the thermostat and offer to make her hot chocolate. Everyone wish her a happy birthday!

I mean, just look at them! Could they be any cuter?

Sewer Routing Uncovers New Form of Torture

(Note: I just spent another weekend going through this all over again. It's a good thing I wrote this blog before that, because I've lost all sense of humor since then.)
 

There came a certain point the other day, when I dropped to the ground in exhaustion and told my wife, "I don't think I can do this."

Get your mind out of the gutter. Or maybe not, since I'm talking about routing out a sewer line.

You may call it a sewer snake, or a router, or go with the trademarked Roto Rooter, but any way you look at it, it's a crap job. Despite my well-known lack of mechanical ability, I've used routers numerous times, back when roots were growing in my sewer. (By the way, the stuff you flush down that's called "root killer" is really, I suspect, root fertilizer.) But several years ago a true professional came in, put a giant trench in my back yard, and replaced the old ceramic sewer line with brand new, professional grade plastic. I've had no problem since.

Until last weekend.

And it always happens on a weekend, in order to maximize your troubles. Emily and I were preparing for an author appearance, and I headed to the basement for a folding table. There it was: two pools of water over the lowermost drains.

Indoor swimming pools are only fun if you can control what kind of water goes with them.

Ah, but now the good news: While replacing the line, the pro guy put in something called a cleanout, and its purpose is to give you a place to put in the snake/router/out-of-control-metal-tentacle-monster if you need to clear a blockage.

The router I rented weighed six thousand pounds, but it was way easier using it outside than trying to work it through a drain in the basement. I put fifty feet of writhing, hand-smashing sewer snake into the line. It did absolutely nothing.

Which is pretty much standard with my home maintenance jobs.

So, Emily and I hoisted the whole 6,000 pound unit down the outside stairs to the basement where, no matter how much I tried, the snake wouldn't fit into the hole. ("That's what he said." I know you're thinking it.) Then we hoisted the whole 6,000 pound unit back up the basement stairs and into the back of our SUV.

Have you ever heard a car scream? It's not pretty.

But the place I rented it from (Doc's Hardware, downtown Albion), traded me a smaller unit for no extra charge. That one, with maybe a bit of effort, did go into the basement drain. After about twenty-five feet of pretending I was my house's doctor giving it a colonoscopy (now it knows how I feel), the router bit came out with a substantial amount of yuck clinging to it.

It sounds so much easier than it was. I'm not just talking about the pushing and pulling, and the invention of new curse words. To get the router bit in I had to lay on the floor, stick my hand into the drain, and physically force it around a bend in the pipe. Yeah. You know what was in that drain? Yes. Yes it was.

This is why, during our after action review, Emily poured two gallons of peroxide and then three gallons of alcohol on my hand. You see, so much skin had been skinned (thus the term) that, had it been broken (as at one point I thought it had), the doctors could have examined my bones without doing x-rays. Emily was, quite rightly, concerned about infection. (I mean, we do know where it's been.) She was also rightly concerned about the neighbors calling 911 after all the screaming, but I suppose they're used to me by now.

I felt like I was victim #3 on an episode of Game of Thrones.

(Note: We need to buy more peroxide and alcohol, and maybe drinking alcohol, too.)

I don't remember at what point I told Emily that I wasn't sure I could do this. It was fairly early in the process, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm in my fifties, and last time I routed a sewer line I was in my forties. I don't feel any different--except for when I try something like this.

But we did do it, and it took less than twenty-four hours. (Note: The first time.) As of this moment, only two days later, I can flex my hand again, the scrape on my abdomen has stopped oozing, and I can use my arms as long as I don't lift them over the level of the scrape on my abdomen.

I'm going to call that a win.

 It really wasn't that bad, see?

Don't Cry For My Air Conditioner

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.

At least a fire would have taken care of that ugly wallpaper.

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.

Nice Fall, Have a Good Trip

It was a strange day, in that I did home maintenance work, but didn't get hurt.

Not exactly.

I closed all the storm windows, and replaced some screens. I still have creases in some of my finger bones from doing that in previous autumns.

I started up the furnace without so much as a single explosion. Our furnace uses hot water heat: Nice, even heating, without the pain and dust of blowers and ducts. However, it was constructed during the Nixon administration. Turning it off in the spring is kind of like a cliffhanger at the end of a TV season, when you're not sure if the show's going to be canceled.

I climbed on the roof to clean out a gutter, which drains water from the second floor, and eventually, onto my head. This requires me to stand on a rubber-coated flat portion of my roof. The last time I tried that when the roof was wet, I did an uncanny imitation of Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football, complete with "Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh!"

All went boringly well, which I found very exciting.

To clean the other gutters I had to climb a ladder. As a firefighter of over three decades I have a great deal of experience climbing ladders. I've climbed ladders with fifty feet of fire hose draped over one shoulder, while carrying an ax in my other hand, with a forty pound air bank on my back, in zero visibility and zero degrees temperature. At no time on a fire scene have I ever had a mishap on a ladder. At home, while cleaning the gutters, I once had a twenty foot extension ladder fall on my ear.

The gutters are now clean. No life-threatening incidents ensued.

Honestly, I was beginning to despair of having anything to write about as I finished my fall prep work and went inside. There my wife asked me to get some frozen meat out of the garage freezer.

So I guess it's her fault.

My garage is presently junk central. I know what you're thinking, and no, yours isn't as bad as mine. It presently has in it three lawn mowers, due to past misadventures. There are also four giant cardboard boxes, the kind you put major kitchen appliances in, which we'd procured to build a fort for the grand-twins. There are several lawn-sized trash bags full of aluminum cans--we save them until we get over a hundred pounds, which gets us a better price at the recycling place. Out of room, I'd balanced one of them on my wheelbarrow. There are more tools than at Doc's Hardware, of the variety you'd usually find in a medieval torture chamber, and half of them are on the floor. There is 250 feet worth of extension cord and 50 feet of garden hose. For all that, I have never, ever fallen in my garage.

Until I had in my hand four packages of frozen meat, weighing perhaps fifteen pounds in all. For the record that included hamburger, sausage, chops, and steak.

I closed the freezer door, turned, and fell over.

It was pretty much as simple as that. Something got behind my feet, and that was that. On the way down my upper thighs hit a lawn mower, which made the rest of me go down that much harder. My head caved in a large wire animal cage which, I'm happy to point out, was unoccupied.

The good news is that the concrete floor broke the rest of my fall.

Then the huge cardboard box slowly tipped over directly toward me. It was full of bags of aluminum. Well, it was.

The whole thing was right out of a Home Alone movie.

So I lay there, taking inventory. Something (the mower's gas cap, I think) was jammed into my upper thigh. The bags had not broken open, so I hadn't suffocated in an avalanche of pop cans, and the bags were easily thrown aside. I was still holding three of the four frozen packages. The other problem was that, with my legs flung over the mower and my head jammed against the cage, I wasn't at all sure I would be able to get up.

I quickly formulated a plan. I would text to my wife: "Watson, come here; I want to see you". This was the first thing said by Bell on the first telephone call, and I figured she'd appreciate the humor. Too bad I'd left my phone inside.

So it took a little while to get off the floor, but eventually I did, and the rest is anticlimactic. Ibuprofen, muscle salve, literally rolling out of bed the next morning. If I had a buck for every time my back hurt, I'd buy a chiropracter. I still can't sit properly, as the gas cap seems to have actually bounced off my left upper femur.

 The irony there is that I was assaulted by the same mower I wrote about a few months ago, the one I had so many problems with. Revenge?

Or just one final indignity?

That one.

This home "improvement" sent me into physical therapy.

Back Cracking and Mower Mania

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.

Revenge of the Water Heater

 Note: I wrote most of this piece a month ago, put it into a draft, and immediately forgot about it. I decided to post it now because a few days ago I mentioned in passing that I was attempting home maintenance, and there have since been several inquiries about me at local hospitals. I'm still here, I survived, and thanks to my brother my home once again has running water.
 

The thing about a water heater is that it's supposed to heat water--hence the name--and then hold aforementioned heated water until you let it out. If the water gets out before you want it to, that's a problem. It's also a problem if the heated water isn't heated, but never mind.

So when I saw water leaking out of the bottom of my water heater, it naturally occurred to me that I might have a problem. And what does one do in modern times when one has a problem? That's right: consult the internet.

The internet told me that the water might be coming from the drain valve, in which case I might be able to cap it. (It wasn't.) Or, it might be coming from anywhere else, in which case both I and my wallet were screwed. Further consultation revealed that "screwed" was not meant literally, so my collection of mismatched screwdrivers would not help me. Nor would the jar full of screws I've found in random places, and always wondered what they were supposed to be holding together.

Further, I discovered drinking a screwdriver would help, but only temporarily.

The internet told me my water heater is approaching its normal lifespan anyway, and there's no use crying over spilled water. However, it also told me that if the leak isn't too bad, and the water isn't damaging anything, I could go on using the heater for years more before it finally conks out.

(I suspect it was people on the internet who said that, rather than the internet itself. Then again, keep feeding information into a computer system and sooner or later it's going to figure stuff out for itself--we've all seen those movies.)

This idea suits me. (The "keep using it" idea, not "the internet's taking over" idea, which terrifies me.) "Ignore the problem and maybe it'll go away" is a creed I've lived by when it comes to home repairs, or anything mechanical. Yes, that may have led to a tire falling off my car, but no creed is perfect.

On a quite definitely related note, I also discovered that the valve to shut off water to my heater is corroded so badly that it's no longer a valve. It's just a scaly green blob with no logical function, rather like a politician's brain. I can't change the heater without shutting off water to the entire house, and the house is heated with water. If that's not an excuse to put the whole thing off until cold weather ends, I don't know what is. What could possibly go wrong?

 So I put it off until May, and started work three days before our town's spring cleanup day, when I could put the old water heater out. Three days later I was indeed able to take the old heater out, just in time. At that point I didn't have any water, hot or cold, and due to a pressure surge I'd also lost my  washing machine. But hey, I got rid of that old water heater.

I could go into more detail, but it's a little hard to type with these burned fingers and the strained shoulder. On the other hand, the sore toe and damaged knees make for a good excuse to catch up on episodes of Fargo. Thanks to my brother everything's up and running except for the washing machine, which was at least three decades old and bought used, anyway.

My home, which was also bought used, is always looking for new and original ways to beat me down. I suppose when it's time to install the new washing machine, it'll find a new way.

This is where my home maintenance projects usually go.

Worst Home Maintenance Fail Ever

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.

This photo is from my chimney demolition, which led to a broken sledge hammer, smashed ladder, and big hole in the ground.

Water Heater Mayhem

A certain percentage of the population will insist that if they can do something, it's easy for anyone to do.

Example: I take a woodworking class in high school (because an industrial arts class was required and I wasn't any good at getting out of that kind of thing). "It's easy. Anyone can use a saw and sander, and make a bookcase."

Well, I have a dozen bookcases, and I didn't make a single one of them. I also have an Incomplete in woodworking class.

Keeping a small engine going is easy, with just a little training and practice. Tell that to the crew of the passing 747 who found a piece of my mower blade and a spark plug embedded in a wing after the infamous Exploding Lawn Mower Incident of 1998. I don't care how much the federal investigator claims it broke the laws of physics.

So when I tell you I'm a little nervous about installing our new water heater, I don't want to hear any of that, "ah, it's easy" crap. The E.R. has a special "ah, it's easy" treatment room. It's right next to the "hold my beer and watch this" ward.

My wife spent the better part of a day researching the best replacement for our heater, which recently went from a small leak to rinsing the basement floor, and wasn't that nice of it to help keep the place clean? Then we drove to the store, and discovered it would fit into our Ford Escape with exactly half an inch to spare. Then came getting it out of the SUV and down the basement steps, which make two sharp right angle turns: One at the inside of an L shaped wall, one at the basement door. Picture it. The new heater weighs 130 pounds, which is still less then the piece of my lawn mower they found inside a barn six miles from my lawn.

And that was still the easiest part of the job, although my back denies it. The rest comes later this week, when I have to remove the old water heater and install the new one. The instructions are pretty plain, step-by-step, and involve electricity and natural gas.

But not to worry: Someone will show up to help, they always do. No one really wants to see my house blow up. That I know of.

I'm sure it'll work out fine. Or if you don't hear from me later, look for a video similar to this one:

https://youtu.be/Cv178a60Ypg

Holy Hole, Batman

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.