I woke up this morning with a song in my heart.\u00a0 Midsummer Day, blue skies, ethereal luminous landscapes, birds singing, flowers blooming, all that crap.\u00a0 And as I dawdled over my coffee and bagel Camera Girl did what all wives do best.\u00a0 She toppled the towers of my fairy tale castle.\u00a0 Report from the kitchen was that the repair I did to the drain line of the sink had failed catastrophically.<\/p>\n
I was outraged!\u00a0 Just a week ago I had disassembled this piece of pvc pipe and its associated o-rings, gaskets and nuts, cleaned it up, inspected the parts.\u00a0 And finding them good, I reassembled it and using a very satisfyingly heavy monkey wrench I socked the brass nut down on the iron sink drain with authority.\u00a0 This failure irked me.\u00a0 So, I gathered my righteous wrath and got my tools out of the garage and descended on that drain line like Thor.<\/p>\n
But the brass nut was now a brass ring and a threaded cylinder.\u00a0 The damn thing had split apart.\u00a0 It was almost as if someone had overtightened it.\u00a0 Knowing this to be impossible I explained to Camera Girl that defective Chinese brass was the culprit.\u00a0 I sighed a manful sigh and after shutting the water valves to the sink and collecting the spool piece and its attendant fittings and specialty items I headed off for replacement parts.\u00a0 I was going to go to my local hardware store but since this pvc stuff only came on the scene thirty years ago I thought maybe I should try the plumbing supply place that I had seen nearby.<\/p>\n
And it was lucky I did.\u00a0 The friendly and competent employee behind the counter eyeballed the wreckage of a fitting and instantly handed me a new one.\u00a0 But when I tried to install it on the pipe, we discovered a very strange situation.\u00a0 The guy who owned the house before me was a very do-it-yourself kind of guy and what he had done was capture the nut between the flange end of the pipe and a tight 90\u00b0 elbow that he glued up behind it afterward.\u00a0 Because the old nut split apart, I could get it around the elbow.\u00a0 But the new nut wouldn\u2019t get by the elbow.\u00a0 I grumbled some very uncomplimentary remarks about my predecessor but the hardware professional was unphased.\u00a0 He noted that the pvc nut that tightened the other end of the pipe in place would fit over the elbow with only light violence and I could use my new metal nut on the other joint.\u00a0 I thought about this for a second.\u00a0 Metal to pvc?\u00a0 Sure, why not?\u00a0 The worst it would do was loosen and I\u2019d put some Teflon tape on it.<\/p>\n
I thanked him and asked him how much for the nut.\u00a0 He said free.\u00a0 I said, \u201cI can\u2019t just get it for nothing.\u201d\u00a0 He said, \u201cThink of it as a sales pitch and come back again next time.\u201d\u00a0 I assured him I would and it wasn\u2019t a lie.\u00a0 That guy knows how to run a business.<\/p>\n
I got home and sure enough the pvc\/iron connection fit like a glove.\u00a0 I made a point of not socking it down with my wrench and determined to check it periodically to see how much it loosened.\u00a0 The other metal to pvc joint was equally clean fitting and wouldn\u2019t give me any trouble.\u00a0 I cleaned up the sink area and returned it to Camera Girl\u2019s jurisdiction with noticeable gratitude on her part.\u00a0 Hail the Conquering Hero.<\/p>\n
In celebration, we took a walk around the gardens and admired the Black-Eyed Susans and roses that were blooming.\u00a0 And just at that time the guy came returning my lawn tractor from repair.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t expecting it back for at least two more weeks so this was definitely manna from heaven.\u00a0 Even with my 20\u201d push mower working again having the sit-down mower would save me four hours of sweat on a hot July morning.\u00a0 So, things were really going my way now.<\/p>\n
Knowing that good things always come in threes I checked the news to see if maybe President Trump had been recognized as the actual winner of the 2020 election while I was busy.\u00a0 No soap.<\/p>\n
Well, it could\u2019ve been much worse.\u00a0 Trying to get a plumber in my neck of the woods is difficult.\u00a0 Leaving Camera Girl without a reliable and convenient kitchen sink would be suicidal.\u00a0 So, this was indeed a best-case result.<\/p>\n
So Midsummer Day was interrupted but not ruined.\u00a0 Now where was that summer idyll I was dreaming of at breakfast?<\/p>\n