I told you this would happen.  At least I think I did, back in a previous blog.  I don’t feel like checking it out.  The thing is, whenever I tackle a plumbing project, it turns into a complete shit storm.  One of my outside shut off valves wasn’t shutting off.  All I needed to fix it was a simple fifty cent washer to replace the worn out one  Shouldn’t be a big deal.  In fact, the leak wasn’t even a big deal- just a tiny dribble seeping from the end of my garden hose that in 24 hours might fill a gallon container, tops.  But that kind of stuff annoys the crap out of me.  The environmental impact is concerning enough.  I know we are fortunate here in the midwest to have plenty of water.  But still,  I see a dripping faucet and I can’t help but think about all the  long suffering people in California.  What I should be doing if I was really on the ball is sending my gallon of water a day seeping from my garden hose out to California.  Those poor people are getting to the point they probably shouldn’t be flushing their toilets but once a week.  If there was a way to ship my gallon of water at no expense, I would gladly start doing it.  I certainly am not the type to profit from another’s misfortune.  But I’ll be damned if I’m going take it in the shorts with shipping charges.  I have financial and  fiduciary responsibilities just like everybody else.  But if someone in California reads this, I will happily send my gallon of water to you if you send me $6.55.* That’s how much the post office guy said it would cost, non-priority.  If you want next day delivery, ok, but that will cost you $12.80.    I want cash or certified check.

*By way of full disclosure, the charge is based on the weight of a gallon of milk.  I was driving by the post office one day on my way back from the grocery store and one of my items was a gallon of milk.  I’de been giving this whole thing some thought and figured since I was right there I might as well bop in and have the post office guy weigh my gallon of milk.  I’m pretty  sure a gallon of water and a gallon of milk weight about the same.  You can see for yourself if you look closely at the pictures at left.  If you’re some fancy pants science dick and want to argue about density and viscosity and molecular weight and all that shit, well you can kiss my ass and go find your water elsewhere.

So I went to my local hardware store in search of the washer I needed.  I had disassembled the valve and took the washer along with me so I could carefully compare it to the one I would purchase. There are over 200 different kinds out there, so that’s just the smart thing to do. Maybe you’re not handy and kind of a dumb shit, so I just thought I would pass this information on to you in case you suddenly have the desire to improve yourself.

I love my local hardware store.  It’s a Westlake Ace.  I guess it’s not exactly local.  Years ago I had three of those places within a four minute drive from my house.  Then Lowe”s and Home Depot  set up shop and well, you know the story.  I haven’t had a real local hardware store for seven or eight years.  But my almost local hardware store is still only about seven minutes away.  That’s not bad.  Lowe’s is ten and Home Depot about twelve.  Here is a picture of Mr Jimmy.  That’s him in the red shirt.  He’s the owner of my almost local hardware store and here he is showing me how to jury rig an electrical circuit.  The person that took the picture is one of his employees, Roxy.  Here is a picture of her right below.  Mr. Jimmy took that picture on the day I bought the nice chain saw you see in the picture.  I already had a chain saw, but Roxy said this one was better.  So I bought it.  And a belt sander.  And a hammer drill and a butane torch and a couple dozen other things she was sure I would need.  Roxy really knows her hardware.

What I really like about my Westlake store is they sell a lot of their stuff individually.  You can buy one or two of something.  In my shop I have at least 500 screws and another 500 bolts and nuts of different sizes.  And it never fails- the one size or type I need I don’t have.  That’s exactly how I came to own 1000 pieces of this type of hardware.  I had to buy a package of twenty from Lowe”s or Home Depot at some point.  That really sucks.  And true to form, my Westlake store has a huge assortment of individual washers and gaskets for faucets and valves.  But as luck would have it, there were none that matched my old one.  I took a chance and bought a couple of  washers that were slightly different in size.  When I got home I spent two hours trying to shave and trim both to fit and seal correctly, but all I accomplished was to make the valve more difficult to shut on and off and I still had my leak.

So off to Lowe’s I went.  I spotted one that looked like it might do the job, but of course it came in a package of five.  After fiddling with that one at least the valve was easier to turn, but it didn’t slow down the dribble much.

You’re probably thinking where in the hell is this all going.   Don’t be so impatient.  That’s the trouble with the youth of America- always in a hurry.  Pay attention here and you might learn something.  All because the manufacturers of these valves won’t provide any easily identifiable 50 cent replacement washers for their products, I had to buy a whole new $7.95 valve.  That kind of shit just plants a rash on my ass.  But that’s only the beginning.  In replacing the valve, the thread on the pipe at the connection point was rusted and snapped.  To reinstall a new piece of pipe, (another $24.50 to have the correct length of pipe cut and threaded) i had to spend a half day outside of my house blindly trying to screw the inside thread into the inside shut off valve that is inside of my house.   To speed up the process, it sure would have been handy to be able to see through building walls.  If I could do that, I could get the whole project done in a half hour.

And if Jake could see through walls, that would have really been nice because he wouldn’t have ended up in jail.  Jake is an old friend from college.   Not only would that have saved Jake, but it would have saved a lot of time for a good two dozen guys who lived on the North wing of the 4th floor of Swanson Hall during my sophomore year.  I bet if all of them could have seen through walls, collectively the group’s GPA would have climbed by a solid point.  That’s because the only thing they had going for them in the way of trying to spot a naked coed through a carelessly left open window shade in the women’s dorm a half a block away was to implement a sorry practice of “dorm window battleship”- so many columns across, so many rows down.  And of course it was imperative to keep a  steady hand while grasping the binoculars.  And you had to wait your turn for the binoculars.  I think there were only three sets of those.  The thing about Jake though was, since he insisted he was the one who thought up “dorm window battleship,'” he should always get to hang on to one set of binoculars.  He simply would not give them up.  A guy we called Homer got so irritated with Jake he thought he would pull a one-upmanship thing by utilizing a small telescope he happened to have laying around, but that kind of backfired on Homer because it was just too cumbersome.  Jake understood right away you just can’t move a telescope around like you can binoculars.  Jake got the last laugh on Homer there.  Of course all of this kind of carrying on is information I am passing on to you second-hand.  I really don’t know for sure how all this worked.   I was at the library studying at the time.   If you don’t believe me here is a picture.Oh, sorry.  That’s just a picture of a subject I had to study while I was at the library. 

The one I meant to show you is over at the right.  That’s me getting all primed for an all-nighter at the library.   An all-nighter for me as you probably know ended at 10pm.  That’s when they closed the library.   I always brought along a full thermos of coffee to see me through.  And I found that a dozen teaspoonsful of  sugar mixed in got me pretty well super-charged for the evening.  Of course now there’s Adderall.  Back in my day, the big thing was Dexedrine.  But as you can probably tell from my picture, I had no need for that kind of crutch.  I was pretty well motivated without any illegally outsourced assistance.

My friend Jake told me he would pop a dexie now and then.  He said they really helped him concentrate.   Here is a picture of Jake studying in his dorm room.   Because he couldn’t see through walls, he spent so much time studying he never went to class.  Between flunking all his classes and a spiraling amphetamine addiction,  he ended up dropping out of school and then went kind of haywire and ended up in prison on larceny and drug charges.  If only he had been able to see through walls.  Some guys just can’t catch a break.