Plumbing Parts - To the Rescue!

Remember my broken shift lever on my truck? With a little bit of glue and a small piece of 1-1/4" drain pipe, I was able to fix it. A little bit of chrome to accessorize my vehicle. Pretty Cool!

Postdeluvian Carnage

I realized with the last blog that I mentioned The Flood, but never wrote about it in our blog. It all started with a Sunday night noise in the garage. The compressor was running for no apparent reason. It was about dinner time when I went out to check why. I opened the door to the compressor room, couldn't see a reason why, and shut off the breaker. I would check it out the next day after work. Later that same night, Janene saw a mouse in the garage, so she opened the door to let it out. Then we went to bed.

I was awakened at about 3:30 AM to the sound of "KaTink"! It sounded for all the world like someone was smacking a metal pipe. No worries- the house always makes sounds. At 4:00 AM, heard another "KaTink"! This time I thought for sure it was a pipe so I got up. There was no water upstairs in the sinks or toilets. I knew that meant we had some frozen pipes, so I went downstairs to investigate. The garage was freezing cold, the door was open,the door to the compressor room was open too, and I could tell the pipe shaft to upstairs was a lot colder than it should be. I grabbed an electric heater and put it in the garage(after closing the door) thinking that if things got warmer the pipes would thaw. Now, to get back to bed. ZZZZ!

 Janene dreamed that she had done something wrong with a computer and was now in trouble with the police. She was trying to find a lawyer before I found out about the terrible thing she had done, and that woke her up. She went downstairs and discovered water spraying out of the wall, with a flap of sheetrock
modulating the spray just like a rainbird and it was "watering" our living room garden! Furniture and all.

 We went downstairs and discovered that it was raining in the basement and a lake had formed downstairs.

 We found two more places where pipes had burst and had to cut two more holes in the wall to get to them. One hole was right behind our lawn sprinkler timer, so that was all messed up.

 Our food storage room was full of water, but luckily, most of the important stuff was up off the floor.

 In our storage room where all the kid's stuff is stored, we had water everywhere. Again, luckily the worst of the damage was to the 7 tons of National Geographics we have stored in the basement. Most everything else was up off the floor.

 The furnace did not fare so well. The furnace was full of water pouring into it from the ductwork upstairs. We could hear electrical buzzing and arcing sounds coming from the furnace. I had to think twice about stepping into the water in my bare feet to get to the shutoff valve. In the end, a lot of the furnace controls needed to be replaced before we could get the heat back on. That meant propane heaters, electric space heaters and a full fire in the fireplace on a red burn day. We had to call disaster cleanup and HVAC guys to help us out. We also had to call in Brother Tolman to fix the plumbing and Larry to fix the electrical.

The culprits ended up being the three "KaTink" pipes that burst in the night and then sprayed water once they  thawed out. Even with all this damage, it was not near so bad as the trouble Janene had dreamed herself into - and that made it easier for her to bear. So the moral of the story is never leave the door to the compressor open  and don't be afraid to let a mouse share in the warmth of our happy (and heated) home.

Super Bowl Free-for-All - with good food!

With our home still torn apart from the flood and with furniture pushed out of the living room, we were not so sure that a houseful of grandchildren was going to be a really good idea. As it turned out, Super Bowl Sunday was a great night to have a lot of the kids over. We couldn't get the Super Bowl on the TV so we spent time with kids and grandkids instead. We had a paper airplane air war with some of the pilots launching their craft from the loft and others climbing the stairs and the furniture to retrieve theirs. Joseph commented that he liked what we had done with the room - it seemed so much more open. The little ones took advantage of the open space by learning to do flips and somersaults. There was even a fair amount of jogging going on.

I think if it wasn't for the flood, we would never have allowed the kids to have such a good time. There is something about coming downstairs to seeing a "rainbird" targeting all your living room furniture, hardwood and carpet that makes a few thirty pound kids walking on your living room couch seem not so bad. We had a good time; they had a good time; and, as Janene said after the kids went home, - somehow this home that is filled with love seems to recover just fine.

Venturing Above the Smog

 Finally, we got a break from the smog and bitter cold this year. As we look out over the valley, we can see that, for the most part, we are above the thick brown layer the government warns us is"unhealthy". Janene and I took off again and went snowshoeing. This time we went a little farther. At the start, the sky was pretty impressive with the criss-cross contrails.

 Later when we got to the Salt Lake side of the trail, it was hard to even be able to see what was under that thick layer of guck. I wonder if this is what Brigham Young saw when he looked over the valley?

 When we looked toward home, it was amazing to see the terraces cut by the CCC corps in the 1930's. When you think of how big an area they terraced, and that it was all done by hand with picks and shovels, it really makes you stop and think what a big effort this was. No one in their right mind would even think of sending people out to do this by hand now. They would hire a contractor with some heavy equipment and a few people would be employed - not thousands. That is probably why big public works projects wouldn't really affect the unemployment rate nowadays.

I still find it amazing that we can do this so close to home and be up in the mountaintops like this. We were out for a long time before we even saw another person. We live in a pretty good place.