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fixing the pisser IV
Wednesday, May 18 2016
My urinal system has slowly ground to a halt over the past couple weeks, indicating that crystals had grown so thick somewhere along the pipe that the flow could no longer make it out to the piss bucket near the northeast corner of the house. Well, it could make it, but not at a rate fast enough to empty the funnel between times that I needed to piss (which, especially during the late morning when I am drinking a frightful amount of tea, is often). Normally I don't have to resort to pissing in gin bottles except in the coldest part of the winter (when the system freezes). But that couldn't've been the case in this season. In the past, it's typically taken two and a half years for the urinal system to clog up in this way, but this time it only took thirteen and a half months. Maybe my drinking kratom tea had accelerated the formation of crystals. As it has for the last several times, unclogging the urinal today involved a custom PVC-and-brass device called the "urinal pressurizer." After blowing the clogs out with that (and an attached air compressor), I dumped in some Liquid Plumr (sodium hydroxide), presssurized that through, and then flushed it all out with water. I caught the Liquid Plumr at the bottom in a bucket, neutralized it with vinegar, and dumped it out in the middle of Dug Hill Road so it wouldn't kill vegetation or anything that wasn't about to get run over anyway.
Our mailbox had become increasingly battered through the years, mostly after having been hit by snowplows. The other day Gretchen bought a brand new one to replace it, but I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to actually install it. So today she took matters into her own hands and did the replacement herself. Involving a screw gun and a piece of wood, the task lay a little outside her normal skillset, but she soldiered on. She managed to install a new horizontal piece of wood for the box to sit on, but then she couldn't manage to screw in the horizontal screws for which she'd drilled holes, reporting that perhaps it was actually a two-person job. When I went to finish the task, I found that she'd pretty much destroyed the phillips bit on my screw gun (from not having firmly seated the bit in screws while turning them). This was evidently also the reason she'd been unable to screw home the screws she'd been forced to abandon. I take a lot of things for granted in my intuitive sense of materials science, and this includes the need to hold a loosely-secured object still with one hand while firing a screw into it with the other.
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