Honestly, we don't know what is going on with the weather today. While it was apparently a cold and wintry day in the Northeast, we had it easy in Michigan. Blue skies with occasional puffy white (or grey) clouds, almost fifty degrees, very comfortable to be outside doing fall kinds of things.
Like shooting high-pressure air through the water irrigation pipes in order to remove all the water out of them before they freeze.
That's one of the 'benefits' of living in this neighborhood where practically all of the houses came with built-in irrigation systems. At least once a year, the homeowner must hire someone to come in and attach a high-pressure compressor to the lines and blow all the water out. Otherwise, when the ground gets to the point of a "hard freeze" - typically mid-November - ice will form inside the pipes and burst them. Not fun.
But this savvy homeowner rigged up his own little compressor and spent an hour or so pumping air into the pipes and getting rid of most of the water without going to the trouble of hiring someone else to come in and do it for him.
Kinda stupid, actually, considering that we only had the irrigation water turned on for a grand total of about two hours during the entire summer. What happened to Global Warming??
That was only one of the exciting 'plumbing' jobs for today, though. The most fun was un-clogging the sink, which had been subjected to an attack of overcooked pumpkin seeds en masse. You probably know that the garbage disposal output pipe feeds into the main drain pipe underneath the sink; but did you realize that there is a backflow device inside the pipe which keeps drain water from the other sink from backing up into the garbage disposal? And did you realize that this backflow device reduces the diameter of the outflow pipe by a factor of 2? Which means that if you overload it with a bunch of chopped-up, overcooked pumpkin seeds, the pipe jams up.
It didn't take much to unclog the pipe, but it did take a bit of clean-up when the sudden rush of water behind the seeds decided to jump the bucket and land on the floor instead. Nothing a dozen towels couldn't solve, of course. Or a mop, if I'd had one.
Did you know that wet, chopped pumpkin seeds are very sticky, and very hard to clean off of a dozen towels?
Oh, well, there were more fun things to do out in the garage. It was time to work on the car!
There are three spots on the Subaru which have sufficient rust to warrant special treatment; unfortunately, the largest one required removal of the rear bumper. That was fun! Not. Took me a couple hours to pull it off, de-rust the spots, apply the appropriate chemical sealant, then put the bumper back on. Because Cheryl was about to come home after dropping the boys off at their Youth Group activity and picking up groceries. And I needed to clean the debris off the garage floor and re-park the Subaru so it was out of the way.
After all that fun activity, it was time for me to sit down and watch The Bourne Identity again. With a bowl of chips and some salsa. Love me some Jason Bourne!
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