Rants

Even when the gurgle monster strikes. We were doing some clothes washing when a strange sound emanated from under the house. The really bad news came when a toilet flush bubbled back up the bathtub drain. Eight thirty on a Sunday morning I started dialing plumbers.

First one I called must have a new phone system because when the answerer kicked in it said, “The person you have dialed has not set up their mailbox. Good bye.” Plumber #2’s andwer kicked in fine and I left a message. After thirty minutes they hadn’t called back (and never did), I picked another one to call. My third option was #3 on the list because they are pricey compared to others we’ve dealt with, but a real live person answered the phone. He even called the city for me to get them to come out to see if it might be their problem and not mine while I decided whether I wanted to wait for the city to find out something before committing to having one of his plumbers come out (there is a $125 call out fee for Sundays.)

When he rang back I told him to send away as we had checked with neighbors and they weren’t having issues. Besides we just had the bathrooms remodeled and who know s what might have gotten disturbed after being woken up from a 50 year slumber in that process. The plumber and the city fellows showed about almost at the exact same time 45 minutes later. The three of them spent the next 45 minutes looking for for my clean out. We had no clue, never needing it in the 19 years we’ve been here. Our 80+ year old neighbor from across the street came out and offered up his advise to where to find it. Then the next door neighbor showed up to complicate matters by reminding that these houses were once on septic systems until sometime in the sixties, so the clean out might be in the back. Finally the city guys found it using a metal detector. It was about two feet away from the water meter.

Looking down the hole we could see a trickle of water flowing towards the street. Uh-oh. Just to be sure they stuck a pressurized hose down there to confirm it was my problem and it was. The plumber went to work. He dug up a place near the house looking for another clean out. He crawled under the house trying to chase pipes. He sat in his truck and wrote out my “options.” Number one was snake, starting out from the street, and hopefully reach any clog $$$. Option two was continue digging around near the house hoping to stumble on a closer clean out to use the snake in $$$$. Or option three, redo my entire under house drainage system $$$$$$.

We chose option one and got lucky, he found and cleared the clog with very little snake left on the reel.

When I went to blog on Friday night I tried several times to upload the image you see in Friday’s post. It would never finish uploading, always timed out. So I wrote the words out and guess what? I couldn’t save the post. I used the repair tool in Cpanel but that made no difference. I backed up the database with a plugin and I exported it using WordPress’s built in feature. I considered upgrading to 2.5.1. I tried again this evening and couldn’t get it to work again. I tried adding a comment to a post. That worked. I triedto post by adding a chunk at a time. That worked for one chunk, any more that 10 words and it wouldn’t save. I gave up. Wait ’til I get home and then I’ll try and post stuff.

In spite of the rain, which was mostly light, we enjoyed spending a couple three hours shopping and eating in downtown Blue Ridge before heading back to the cabin for the rest of the day. Later in the day the skies cleared and the sun came out, but by then we were to settled to go back out. There was a game room with a foosball table, an arcade game console with several vintage games and a pool table. I was reminded that I sucked at pool when I was younger and that 30 years away from playing hadn’t improved my game any. Fortunately most everyone else was as sorry at it too.

My guaranteed to please everyone movie was not a total success, one person didn’t even watch and another got up and went to bed at about the halfway point. And truth be told I would have rather seen the original version. And probably the other three people were just being polite by staying to the end.