Weekend Update

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Raining on my Parade

The other night (Friday, I believe) I decided it was just plain wrong of me to leave the faucet in my tub dripping. I opened the access panel in the closet behind the tub in search of a shutoff valve, and found none. Why would someone put in a shutoff valve next to a fixture? The genius who plumbed my house had zero foresight. And I know he wasn't a real plumber because the pipe joints are sloppily soldered, the sign of a real novice.

Off I went to the basement in search of the nearest shutoff valve. Unfortunately for me, the plumbing in the basement is a rat's nest of kluged-together plumbing remnants. I'm sure the way they planned the job went something like this:

Cletus: Okay Vern, we have 12' of 1/2" flexible tubing, 8'3" of 3/16" hard copper, 13 elbows, 7 tees, a gallon of solder and a hair dryer. How much you figger we can git done?
Vern: I'd say the whole thing.

And that's how they did it. There are so many pipes running this way and that, that had they planned what they were doing would have been unnecessary. But I'm a little ahead of myself here.

While looking for shutoff valves for the shower, I came across a wet spot on the floor. It wasn't coming in from a wall, the dehumidifier wasn't leaking, and a cursory inspection of the nearby pipes came up negative. I even smelled it, thinking it might be cat pee. Nope, this was water.

Then, a drip landed on my head. I gave the pipes above me a thorough look-see and there was water on my gas line. "Ruh-roh". "Please be condensation, please be condensation." It turned out it was the pipe above the gas line that was leaking; I was mildly relieved. What sucks is that it's not a solder joint, but right smack in the middle of the pipe. I peeled back the asbestos-looking pipe wrap to find a series of small corrosion spots on the pipe. One was leaking and the others looked to be not far behind. I put some emergency leak stopping wrap over the pipe which succeeded only in making it drip further down. Damn!

Since it was late, there was nothing else I could do. Without a trustworthy shutoff valve anywhere in the house, I had to turn off the main line to avoid the inevitable pipe burst in the middle of the night.

Until I get a chance to replace the corroded pipe (and redo the shoddy work the last guy did), I have to plan my water usage so that I can turn the water back on, do what I have to do, and turn it back off again. I do NOT want to come home to a burst pipe!

OH, and while I was inspecting the plumbing, I walked through a spider web and the spider jumped on my head. He may or may not have gnawed on my arm and stomach, but I have a few wicked itchy bites from something.

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Autumn is Close

The weekend wasn't all leaking pipes and spider bites, it also served as a perfect weekend for bike rides. On Friday I awoke late (recall that I was out on the town until the wee hours of the morning), had breakfast, read a magazine or two in the sunshine, and headed out for a bike ride. My company for this ride had not set ass on a bike in weeks, was undoubtedly tired and hung over from the previous night's debauchery, and had probably not eaten a decent meal all day. Tired, hung over and hungry makes for a bad ride for everyone because you become the weakest link, the person I have to wait for every 1/8th mile.

I try to be forgiving, but at times it's hard. The worst was that when I planned the ride, it was assuming an average speed in the area of 16 MPH. That's slow, but how most group rides go. A 40 mile ride should take about 2.5 hours. However, at 13 MPH with frequent breaks, the ride quickly escalated to nearly 4 hours. I hadn't packed any sandwiches and was getting really hungry and cranky by the end. Lesson learned? Probably not. I prefer company to speed, so the next time I want company I'll probably suffer again.

On the positive side, I did get to take a 4 hour tour of the rolling hills of northern Berkshire county. With the leaves getting ready to change, it was quite the scenic ride.

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Over and Out,
Old Coot