Holidays and Writing

Holidays and writing don’t mix.

I had visitors this memorial day holiday. That means I had to clean the place up a little so they wouldn’t trip over the junk in the living room, or any other room for that matter. It also meant deep cleaning the bathroom and other such fun stuff.

Yeah, fun stuff like scrubbing the bathtub extra clean at 11:00 at night.

With visitors in the house I didn’t have time to do anything else. They drove a long distance to see me and they don’t come up often. I didn’t even get to go through most of my emails at night. I had over 300 emails from three days of being with my friends. The day after memorial day I when through and deleted several newsletter subscriptions to reduce the number of emails I get.

It was three days of good meals, some I cooked. Going and seeing things and people, and getting things done around the house. My friend helped with a couple of big projects here at my house. Sometimes it takes two people to tackle the big projects.

It is a little hard to get back to writing. I had to clean up the place after my friends left. I also had to finish a couple of projects that didn’t get done while my friend was here to help.

left over item was replacing the faucet in the bathroom. That took over three hours to do. I had to replace the shut off valves under the sink and the main shut off valve for the house leaked and leaked badly. Getting enough force on the old valves under the sink to get them off is a problem. The cabinet doesn’t give you much room to work in and the sharp edge of the cabinet is hard to lay on.

The next day I replaced the Reverse Osmosis unit under the kitchen sink. I was bruised and sore from the working under the bathroom sink, but this turned out to be worse. The last time I put in a RO unit I installed a stuff off valve under the sink so I could change the RO cartridge without turning off the water to the house. Of course that valve leaked and it was an expensive ball valve. Back out to the side walk and stuff the water off at the water meter. It will be a little time before I can replace the stuff off valve at the side of the house. That valve is soldered in.

The RO unit uses push on plastic pipe and fittings. Easy for home installers, but the connections will leak. When I turned the water on to the RO unit a leak squirted water in my face. In seemed like every fitting would start to leak after a while. Pushing and puling on the fittings got them to stop leaking.

So why didn’t I call in a plumber? It would have cost me 5 times the cost of the RO unit and faucet combined to have him do it. The RO unit was over a hundred dollars.

Now to get back to the old grind of writing.

Stay strong, write on.       Professor Hyram Voltage