"I don't get paid just for pushing the button..."

"...I get paid for knowing which button to push."

So goes the punch line to one of my favorite techie jokes. Up until recently I've been perfectly happy to leave plumbing jobs to expert button-pushers, but a combination of chutzpah and stinginess caused me to take on a plumbing repair this week.

The weather has been more frigid than usual this winter, and we've had a few pipe freezes, primarily in the kitchen and laundry room, where the pipes have to run through our completely uninsulated crawl space. I thought we'd gotten lucky, with no pipe bursts, until last weekend, when I noticed the carpet in front of the clothes washer was a little damp. Yes, there is carpeting in the laundry area, which is completely impractical, but that room, the kitchen, and the dining room are really one big room, and we're holding off until we can replace the floor in all three places. I didn't think much of the wet, since the Munchkin likes to help move wet things from the washer to the dryer, and it's pretty common for them to land on the floor in between.

The next day, I was putting dirty laundry into the washer in my sock feet, and noticed the carpet was still wet. Even wetter actually.

Crap.

Turns out the freezes had caused a slow leak in the cold water pipe to the washer. Worse, that leak was before the cut-off to the machine, so as long as the main water supply for the house was on, there would be water in that pipe and it would continue to leak. There was good news, though: the leak was not actually in the crawl space (where it would have gone unnoticed until the pipe burst completely), and, as plumbing sites go, the space behind our pulled-out washer is relatively spacious.

I could tell roughly where the leak was, in an L-joint, and since it was small and seemed to be at the connection, I thought I could get away with patching it. Trip #1 to the hardware store (G.R. Smith Hardware in Mount Vernon - one of my favorite places) netted me a package of plumber's seal. I took it home, mooshed the two-part epoxy together, and commenced to patching. It only took a few minutes, plus an hour to cure, but when I turned the water main back on, it became clear that the leak wasn't in the connection but in the pipe itself. Bugger.

Before: This is with my attempted (and failed) patch job. Note the soggy drywall and wood. The carpet was pretty squishy.

By this time it was time to fetch the Munchkin from school. Still, I didn't want to just let this thing leak indefinitely, and we couldn't be without water for terribly long. So, the Munchkin got to accompany me on trip #2 to Lowe's (not as awesome as Smith's, but open later) where an incredibly nice guy in the plumbing area helped me find new 1/2" pipe, a new joint, the nasty cement stuff to connect it all, and even cut down the pipe into a few smaller pieces. All the while he kept reassuring me "you can definitely do this." I have no memory of the man's name, but I need to go back and thank himfor making an intimidating task seem completely manageable.

Flash forward to the next day, when I begin my plumbing attempt anew. Why wait? Ever try to get a plumbing job done with a toddler trying to help? Me either, and I don't plan to start now. Anyhow, off goes the water, drain the pipe as best I can, put a cookie sheet down to catch drippage, find hack saw, commence to cutting out the bad section of pipe. This was actually the trickiest part, since the pipe was right up against the wall and trim molding, and in pretty close proximity to another pipe and to the electrical line. I did some damage to the drywall, which was had gotten a little punky from the leak, but that's about it. Next up, check the length of the pipe and cut to fit. This was pretty much entirely by eye. Assemble the whole works dry and see if it fits. Marvel at how much it reminds one of Tinkertoys. Marvel that the fit is just about perfect. Disassemble everything so we can do it again for real.

Attempt to open cement. Fail. Attempt again. Fail again. Whack at the lid. Use one of those rubber jar-opener things. Use rubber bands around the lid. Whack again. Locate pliers. Hand cramp! Curse loudly and be glad the toddler is not home. Take a break and have a beer. Curse frequently at the irony of taking on plumbing only to be thwarted by a stuck jar lid. Make one more attempt with the pliers. Success!

At this point I was able to reassemble everything using the noxious-smelling cement product, which is just as nose-hair-curling as you'd imagine. After a few hours wait, so that the cement could cure properly, I turned the water back on. The pipe stayed bone dry.

I don't think I have ever been quite so proud of myself. OK, maybe childbirth. Seriously, if any of y'all have a smallish home repair that you've been putting off dealing with, because you don't think you know how, DO IT. Break out the hacksaw and plumber's flux and plan to get a little damp, but give it a try. If it all goes horribly pear-shaped and you need to call a plumber to do it over, you're really only out your own time and the relatively minimal supply cost (remember - you were going to call the plumber anyhow). And if it works? You save a mint and get a massive confidence boost. It only takes one small victory to make all the larger projects on the to-do list seem manageable.

Next up: installing a dishwasher.

After: The white section of pipe is the new stuff. I did a little damage to the drywall. The carpet was still pretty soggy at this point, but a few days later it's dry as a bone.

Because Matt suggested it...

i can haz icemlt? PLZ?

One thousand words

I have been working on the same blog post for nearly two weeks now. Over the past few months, I have started down some sort of pseudo-homesteading path, and was feeling the need to articulate why I feel compelled to do so. Words don't seem to be adequate to explain it, though. One of my favorite homesteading bloggers, Jenna Wogenrich, summed it up by saying "It’s the honesty of knowing what I do everyday directly helps keep me alive." That doesn't quite work for me, since (given our local zoning laws) I am unlikely to start raising livestock any time soon, and the hot peppers and Brussels sprouts I'm planning for the garden are hardly what you'd call staples. Still, in that statement she gets to the immediacy of baking your own bread, growing your own veggies, being connected to the sources of your food, living a more self-sufficient - and yet, oddly, more connected - life. In her case that includes raising her own chickens; in mine, it involves a growing friendship with the farmers who raise the chickens, cows, and lambs we eat.

Food is obviously a big part of this impulse, but it isn't the whole thing. Professionally (if you can call "perpetual grad student" a profession), I pretty much live inside my own head. In our classes, we have endless debates about the finest semantic points, and what seem to be simple declarative sentences get dissected and analyzed until they have lost all meaning. There are days when this sort of work is fun, when the academic exercises feel like tricky mystery plots to solve. Then there are other times, when I feel like, if I don't get out of my brain and do something constructive, I'll explode. Writing filled that purpose for a while, and might yet again, but right now it's too tied up with all that theory. I swear I used to be able to write, but grad school has made it a paralyzing process. The homesteader's life, where the product of your work is concrete, practical, and immediately tangible, is becoming a much-needed respite from that, and one which may very well allow me to continue all that theorizing without going stark staring mad.

Which is all to say that, suddenly, it seems a little pointless to spend so much time attempting to intellectualize what is, at it's core, not an intellectual thing. Instead, I think this sums it up nicely: Who knows - maybe thinking in terms of pictures rather than words will help me keep this site from becoming a complete ghost town.

This never happens to me...

Actual lyrics to a song that was written today about my son (courtesy of a 6-year-old friend):

Super [Munchkin] Rock Star!
Flying to his concert!
Petting all the kitties,
Fighting off the penguins
and polar bears!

To give you a better idea, the music was what Joe has decided to term "toddler-core." Think Trogdor, but without the burnination. Evidently, this was actually only the best of many songs written about the Munchkin tonight, and he indicated his approval by trying to dance on a table.

Seriously - my kid is just way cooler than I have ever been. Must be a recessive gene somewhere.

Black Friday Shmack Friday

Things we did today that did not involve holiday shopping:

• slept in WAAAAAY past 4am
• finished cleaning up from last night's dinner
• kicked a ball around the yard with the Munchkin
• read an entire magazine cover-to-cover
• read books with the Munchkin
• moved the rain barrel to the barn for the winter
• moved the pumpkins from the porch to the compost
• watched the Munchkin practice going up and down the steps
• refilled the bird feeders
• made and ate yummy oyster stew

Now, I will admit that we needed to go to Kroger for bacon and half-and-half for the stew, and we stopped through Lowe's to replace my busted garage door opener, so I suppose we did contribute a little bit to retail numbers for the day. Still, I'd rather have had this day than to have spent it battling crowds and looking for bargains.

Magic beans

You know how you sometimes get those really cool-looking purple beans at farmers markets and the like? And it is always disappointing when you cook them, because they turn the same relatively boring green color as every other bean?

Try this recipe. You'll thank me. Even without the chive blossom vinegar, it rocks.

Another thing about autumn

Spring cleaning, shming cleaning. Fall is a great time to clean out the pantry, figure out what's there and what needs to be restocked, and vow to finally use up all those dry bean soup mixes this year.

Sometimes, the Munchkin helps.

Putting Up

Anybody who has known me for a year has probably heard me talk about how much I adore autumn. Partly this is just because it marks the end of summer. I've been trying to get better about appreciating aspects of each season, but to be honest I really only enjoy summer weather for about three weeks or so and then am ready to stop wearing shorts. Plus, although summer is always billed as vacation-time, all the travel that gets crammed into those three months turns out to be more exhausting than the scheduled routines of the rest of the year. Evidently, when we chose to have a child while living in a different state from the rest of our family, we should have started asking people to donate their frequent-flier miles as a shower gift. But I digress.

The other reason to adore fall is the process of canning, freezing, drying, and otherwise putting up food for the winter. My inner squirrel comes out. The thing I have been doing longest (and am therefore best at) has been pickling. It's pretty close to idiot-proof, and works with beans, beets, cucumbers, okra, and probably a gazillion other things. Unfortunately, my past pickling adventures have resulted in a cabinet jammed full of jars of various kinds of pickles. We simply haven't been eating them as fast as I make them.

So, this year there was a moratorium on pickling. That doesn't mean no preserving, though. I have put up a few pints of applesauce (I'm doing those a little bit at a time, rather than let the apples pile up), frozen a batch of roasted red pepper sauce (which might be cannable, but I could only find pressure-canner instructions), and frozen a sheet tray of jalapenos - some diced, some halved, and some sliced. I still have a handful of habaneros to freeze as well, but was waiting to get gloves first. It turns out that merely washing your hands is totally inadequate to remove capsaicin from ones fingernails - a harsh lesson to learn when you rub your eyes a few hours later. If you want the gory details, ask Joe. He is still laughing.

A Passing

Rest in peace, Paul Newman. He hadn't been on-screen for several years, and had left Hollywood long before that, but he couldn't help being a movie star, and he was a class act to the end.

Olympic

As I have watched the Olympic coverage over the past week, the following thoughts have stuck in my mind:

• What does Al Trautwig do with the rest of his time? I feel like they must keep him in suspended animation, and only thaw him out every four years.
• I would like to see a tickertape parade through Baltimore. Does anyone even have tickertape anymore?
• Dara Torres is two years older than me, with a two-year-old daughter, and has medaled in all three events she participated in. Constantina Tomescu Dita is a year younger, with a teenage son, and won the women's marathon by a tremendous margin. I have spent the better part of the morning unsuccessfully hunting for the Munchkin's right shoe. Perhaps I should consider a multivitamin?

An almost perfect morning

The Munchkin slept pretty well last night, in spite of his teeth, only waking twice. The he slept until 8 (which means I got a shower), and has spent breakfast alternating between actual eating (Puffins and Cheerios - a perennial fave) and dangling Mardi Gras beads so that Hardee will chase them. He is giggling like a loon, while I just sit here enjoying my coffee and watching. Seriously - this is the life.

He's quite the hoopy frood

Some children have security blankets. I was a teddy bear girl. I know one kid who sleeps with his child-sized baseball bat. His older brother was incredibly attached to a small roll of CAT-5 cable.

The Munchkin has a towel.

He sleeps with it, likes to take it in the car, asks for it when I come to pick him up at school. Sometimes he wears it as a cape. For a while he would put it over his head and go careening around the house blindly. That phase seems to have passed, though. I hope.

It is good to know he is prepared for anything, from prickly grass to sippy cup spills to Vogon poetry.

Sacrifices for the cause

I have sustained a clothesline-related injury.

When we moved into our house, there were two rusty t-posts for a clothesline in our side yard. They were pretty damned ugly, so when we needed to regrade the ground around the house, and that necessitated digging up one of them, I was thrilled to bits. Joe and I dragged the damn thing (which was incredibly heavy - the concrete that had been holding it in the ground was still attached) out to the barn, and as far as I know it is still there lo these many years later, waiting for us to come up with some sort of more permanent disposal solution.

The second post was a bit more problematic. It is flanked by Rose of Sharon, and to dig it up would almost undoubtedly involve killing them. Plus, we'd have to re-enact the whole cross-yard drag, and as we are now both 7 years older than we were the first time, neither Joe nor I are exactly eager to do so. Instead, I had planned to camouflage it, using it as a trellis of sorts for clematis or another flowering vine.

Meanwhile, the Munchkin produces piles of dirty diapers each week, and having a clothesline has started looking pretty good, from both a green-living and a cost-cutting point of view. The website Flex Your Power writes:

Clothes dryers are typically one of the most expensive home appliances to operate, accounting for about 6% of total electricity usage. Unlike other appliances, clothes dryers don't vary much from model to model in the amount of energy used and are not required to display EnergyGuide labels. However, that doesn't mean that the amount of energy used by clothes dryers isn't important.

It typically costs 30 to 40 cents to dry a load of laundry in an electric dryer and approximately 15 to 20 cents in a gas dryer.

I'd like to hook up a meter so I could get a more specific accounting of how much energy our dryer uses, but that's a starting point at least.

So, off to GR Smith, our fantastic local hardware store. The supply list was as follows:

100' clothesline	$6.99
2 pulleys	$8.98
clothespins	$3.79
hook to hang the line from our house's siding	$6.99
total	$26.75

Not bad, right?

This is where things start to go haywire.

First, I discover that the eye hooks on the existing post are closed too tightly and rusted in place, so I cannot hook the pulley over it. OK, no biggie - I will just look the clothesline over the horizontal pipe for now, and pick up a new bolt next time I am out. I loop the clothesline over the pipe, and pull the clothesline across to the house. I attach the siding hook, hang the second pulley off it, and then pull the line taut and knot it. It is a thing of beauty, my clothesline.

I run inside to get the load of sheets I just washed. The Munchkin is happily riding on my back this whole time, and seems rather interested in the proceedings. I hang the four pillowcases on the line. A little sag, but nothing major. Then I hang the first sheet.

Well crap.

The entire clothesline has now sagged halfway down to the ground. Each subsequent sheet makes matters worse. No worries, I think - I can just tighten the line to take up some of the slack. I pull on the line, planning to re-knot it.

As the Munchkin would say, "POP"

The strip of siding holding the hook pops out in rather dramatic fashion, causing the hook (which I am kinda-sorta holding) to go flying off into the grass, gouging the living daylights out of my finger, although I do not notice it yet.

The problem is clear. Although those siding hooks are fantastic at holding things like plants - things that only pull down. The problem with a clothesline is that it also pulls out. I clearly need to screw a hook into the side of the house. It is the only way to hold the weight of the line. Also, the "line tightener" gadget that I had passed up the first time is looking like a good investment, since tugging and re-tying is pretty tricky with a clothesline over your head. A prop for the middle of the line also looks like a pretty good idea, since we're talking about almost 50' of line, and some sag is inevitable.

So, I gather the sheets and take them back inside, before heading back to the hardware store. This is when I notice my finger. Or, rather, I notice the blood that seems to be getting all over my nice clean damp sheets. Muttering to myself, I shove them in the laundry and run them through a quick cold wash while I head back to Smith's.

On the second trip, I buy:

wall screw, rated for 120'	$1.79
bolt hook for post	$.99
line tightener	$3.49
prop (for middle of line)	$7.99
total	$14.26

The Munchkin dozed off en route to the store, and stayed out throughout the trip, so after getting him into bed, I set out to complete the job. The sheets (bloodstain-free) are presently blowing in the breeze. I'll be able to re-use the siding hooks, so in total the clothesline cost me $34.02+tax, two trips to the store, a bandaid, a little blood, and an extra washer cycle. Nonetheless, it should pay for itself in roughly 120 uses. Even if I only use it for sheets and diapers, it'll take less than a year.

Fun with numbers

The Munchkin is, at this moment, 1 year, 1month, 1 day, 1 hour, and 1 minute old. The next cool numerical birthday will be June 20, 2008 2:40am, followed by May 23, 2011 12:41am and March 30, 2020 10:47am. Yes, we do celebrate Pi Day at our house. Why do you ask?

Now we are six

I now have no excuse not to participate in this "six things" meme. First I was technically tapped by Swankette, and then more specifically tapped by Jeanne. Besides which, this particular meme walks a nice balance, involving a little bit of thought but almost no creativity - something I am sorely lacking at the moment. So, I now present, six things the readers of this blog might not know about me:

1. (In honor of the end of National Poetry Month) Although I enjoy reading poetry, I detest hearing it read aloud - doubly so when it is read by the poet. One of my worst experiences in high school was when one of my teachers brought in a recording of T.S. Eliot reading "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I used to like that poem, but now all I can hear when I read it is that damned monotonous voice droning on and on and on.... Completely killed it.
2. If I come across Real Genius while flipping through channels, I am constitutionally incapable of turning it off until the movie is over. This is in spite of the fact that Joe and I own a copy of the movie.
3. Joe and I never picked out a girl's name for the Munchkin. The name he got was easy, but every time we talked about names for a girl, it pretty quickly devolved into a battle of who could come up with the worst name. It was a relief when the ultrasound showed a boy, so we could stop trying to come up with names.
4. Much of the work of both William Wegman and Anne Geddes gives me the heebie-jeebies.
5. I have a pathological fear of needles. Actually, a lot of people know this about me. What they may not know is that when I was in 10th grade, I broke my ankle in gym class and had the bone set without anesthesia rather than accept an injection. I swore that having it set would be less traumatic and painful than the shot of Novocaine, and I was right. It turned out the pain of having the ankle set wasn't bad at all, considering the pain of breaking it in the first place. This event led to two things. First, I had my first cross-dressing role on stage. I had been cast as a Hot Box dancer in Guys & Dolls, but since that wasn't possible I was dressed in drag and put behind the newsstand so nobody could see the cast. I sang all the ensemble numbers with the guys. In retrospect, this was probably a step up. Second, the experience at the hospital probably helped put the idea in my head that people who insist I'll want painkillers are not necessarily to be trusted. I hadn't connected the dots until recently, but this (along with some bad medical experiences in college) probably contributed to my deciding to have a home birth.
6. William Brewster (of Mayflower fame) is an ancestor on my paternal grandmother's side. This, if IMDB is to be believed, means I am a distant cousin of Seth MacFarlane. Maybe someday this will get me a cartoon guest appearance on Family Guy, but I'm not holding my breath.

OK, so now to tag some other people. Some of these are long shots, but I'm going to go with TRP, Joe, Lemming, the Pope, Tommyspoon, and Reid. The rules are as follows:

• link to the person who tagged you [check]
• post the rules [check]
• write six things about yourself [check]
• tag six people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs. [check]
• let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their sites. [real soon now]
• let your tagger know when your entry is up [posts on their way]

Go to it!

Many Happy Returns

Happy Birthday to you Happy Birthday to you Happy Birthday, dear Munchkin Happy Birthday to you I am now the mother of a one-year-old, and pretty soon a toddler. It boggles the mind. Oh, by the way - all those of you who hummed the melody as you read this owe the Hill sisters a buck.

Infallible toads

Spring has, at long last, sprung. Sort of. Today is cold and I heard rumors of snow tonight, but the latest that is allowed to happen is tax day, so Winter, you are officially on notice. Hear that? I am not much of a poetry person, but yesterday I heard a poem by Richard Shelton called "Desert Water," which begins

once a year when infallible toads begin to sing all the spiders who left me return and I make room for them

Here in Ohio (most definitely NOT the desert), our own "infallible toads," the peepers, have started singing. Their song is so constant that you almost don't notice them, but once you tune into them, they are almost unfathomably loud. It may be cold, and I may be dressing the Munchkin in turtlenecks for a little while longer yet, but I figure the peepers know what they are talking about. It won't be long now.

When Musicologists do Memes

I picked this up from Phil Ford at Dial M for Musicology, who in turn got it from the marvelously-titled musikwissenbloggenschaft. Voila my indie rock album cover: Granted, it's no "Manchester Center for New Writing," but I'm pretty happy with it. "Institute" is an awesome name for a band. It sounds more to me like a synth-pop group than an indie rock band, or maybe an industrial/noise outfit. I was especially happy with the "men hate it most" - "most men hate it" potential. So here's what you do:

1. Your band name is the first random Wikipedia article you pull up.
2. Your album title is the last four words of the last quote on this page.
3. Your album cover is the third picture featured here.
4. PhotoShop them together
5. Post (preferably with some sort of hypothesis as to what this album would sound like)

I'm thinking of trying a few more of these, although maybe I should just try the song-lyric generator idea instead....

Romper Room

Things I didn't know were toys until I had a son:

• pillows
• an empty Kleenex box
• a square piece of cardboard that came in the bottom of a packing box
• a spoon
• the stereo (last night he programmed it to come on at midnight and play jazz - we did not know it was programmable)
• an empty film canister
• junk mail
• an empty container for wipes
• the television remote
• a coaster
• Joe

It has begun

All day yesterday, the local weather prognosticators were hyping the next storm of the century. Eight inches over two days, which is what our area should get, is hardly legendary, but it is a fair amount for March. The flurries have begun in earnest now. Luckily, I have no place to be for the next few days, aside from a short trip down the road (walkable, if need be) to pick up the Munchkin from school. On the other hand, I do have lots of writing to do - one paper due on Monday, and a meeting with my thesis adviser on Wednesday. It seems the best plan of action is to hunker down with a cup of coffee, get to work, and put off thoughts of spring cleaning for a while.