Age Brings Plumbing Problems

No, not those kinds of plumbing problems! I’m not that old yet. But you might want to check back with me next week, just to be sure things are still working okay.

I’m talking about plumbing problems with our fifty year old house. As I said in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, when we got back from our month-long trip out west, we discovered that the ice maker in our refrigerator was frozen up. We managed to thaw it out, but it’s still not producing any ice. We’re still trying to figure out our next move with that.

And as I said in the same blog, the drain on one side of our double kitchen sink developed a leak, which turned out to be the broken ring that holds the drain in place. We went to Lowe’s to pick up replacement parts and decided that if one side was bad, the other side probably wasn’t going to be too far behind it, so we got parts for both sinks.

A few days ago, Terry and I managed to replace the broken drain and stop the leak, but when we tried to replace the other side, it would not budge. And in the process of trying to get that done, we now had a new leak, this time on the other side. Crawling under the sink and doing all of that was not good for either one of our backs, so we decided we needed to get some help.

That help came yesterday in the form of our neighbor and friend Jesse Bolton. He came over after work and discovered that the problem on the left side of the sink was that whoever put everything together originally had cross-threaded the metal nut that holds things in place. He took that out and replaced the valve for us.

A while back, we also bought new faucets for both of our bathroom sinks, so while Jesse was here, he decided to knock that project out, too. What a guy!

The master bathroom has a double sink, and he did that first, quickly and easily replacing both faucets. That’s a job that would have taken us hours and probably left me unable to move for the next two days.

Then he replaced the faucet in the single sink in the guest bathroom. I always try to help people when they are fixing things, and the best way I can do that is to stay out of their way so their job is much easier. And that’s exactly what I did for the most part. Thanks a lot, Jesse. We really appreciate you and all of your hard work.

In other news, I said in yesterday’s blog that I had received the formatted print edition of The Hard Years, the fourth book in my Tinder Street family saga and that I expected to get the formatted cover for it back sometime yesterday and upload it to Amazon. I said that it was usually a pretty quick process before the book went live. Well, Amazon decided to make a liar out of me. Elizabeth Mackey sent me the cover file, and I uploaded it to Amazon, and twelve hours later, as I write this a little after midnight, it’s still under review. Hopefully, it will be live sometime today.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – Frame every so-called disaster with these words, “In five years, will this matter?”