But Do The Spirits Possess Opposable Thumbs?
(Nature • The Duh Files)
A writer is one who obsessively tells, who can’t help sharing personal details, who reveals secrets, who tattles, spills, babbles, blabs without regard to (or more accurately), in spite of the potential consequences.
So yeah, on one level, even while I was typing the post below, I knew I was tempting Fate by implying that, however inconvenient our current South Texas cold snap might be, it was small potatoes compared with arctic blasts of yesteryear.
While I was crawling around under the house this morning at 5:30 it began to sink in that I’d unnecessarily irritated the spirits, and I was immediately and still remain sorry about that. I re-acknowledge their mighty powers and promise not to diss them in future screeds until this all blows over and I temporarily forget it happened.
The good thing about this morning is that it gives me the opportunity to extol the virtues of a two-year-old Christmas present from my father-in-law, whose virtues I have long been wanting to extol. It’s a little flat plastic gizmo with three tiny but amazingly bright lights on one end, a switch and a strong clip that fastens to the underside of your baseball cap. I laughed when I received it, but stopped laughing and started admiring once its benefits during nighttime barbecuing became obvious. Or fishing.
Or crawling around under a house in 20-degree pre-dawn darkness with a hair dryer in one hand, gauging the relative coldness of various water pipes with the other. This hat-light gizmo is perfect for that. The hair dryer was a Christmas gift, too, but at first we mistakenly thought Santa just got it for my wife.
Here’s the thing: Past history indicates the mercury only dips down to 20 degrees about once every 10 years or so in our present geographic location some 30 miles south-southwest of Houston. So when certain people build or remodel houses or undertake homemade plumbing projects, they like to think that once in 10 years means the odds are that a particular event might not ever occur again.
These are the kind of people with whom you like to play poker.
For some reason, 20 degrees is just about the exact threshold at which water pipes will burst if precautions aren’t taken. Theoretically, they ought to be able to freeze eventually even at 30 degrees, but they don’t. Knowing bad cold weather was coming, I made a recent visit to a couple of local retail establishments with thoughts of pipe insulation and a couple of space heaters dancing in my head, but all they had left was a couple of space heaters.
I wasn’t entirely bummed about not being able to get the insulation. My 95-year-old house has endured many owners, at least half of whom have apparently felt it necessary to add their particular signature to the Rube Goldberg array of water pipes criss-crossing, emerging and disappearing between the piers and beams. To enclose all of that pipe would require so many tens of yards of insulation that one might conclude it probably won’t ever get down to 20 degrees around here again anyway.
Besides, you can always drip the faucets. See, no matter how cold it gets, your pipes won’t burst as long as each faucet is dripping, however slowly. One catch is that if your sink or tub has both a hot and cold water faucet, both have to contribute to the drip or one of them still could freeze and burst.
So if you’re a cheap bastard who’s always thinking about how big the city water bill will be next time and you try to absolutely minimize the drips before you go to bed, it turns out that when you get up early the next morning to make a pot of coffee, the cold-side faucet quit dripping. You turn it on all the way. Nothing. Son of a bitch!
So it is that you find yourself out in the still of winter under a house with your Christmas hat-light and hair dryer, shooting hot air along a three-foot length of old, very cold cast iron pipe and occasionally shooting some down where your belly has become exposed during the vigorous crawl that brought you to this particular place at this particular time. You’re making a lot of noise whooshing the dryer and grunting and bumping your head and swearing a little, but that’s OK because maybe it’ll wake your wife or your boy and they’ll come out to see what’s going on and then you can ask them if cold water is coming out the faucet yet. But they refuse to wake up, so you stay under the house until you notice that your feet are pretty cold even though nothing else is, and your hat-light reveals you’re just wearing crocks because it was early and you forgot to put on real shoes.
When I got back inside to find real shoes, I could hear the cold water running. Eureka! Score one for the hair dryer.
It was time to bask in the glory of my home-remedy plumbing knowledge, and get that coffee pot going. While it was brewing, I clumped around the house checking the dripology of the rest of the faucets, including those upstairs where the residents still stubbornly refused to awaken.
I went back down, thinking about how wise I was to remember that, when dripping your faucets, you have to drip all of them, both hot and cold. Which is when I remembered the washing machine. Faucets are attached to the back of it, but how the hell do you drip a washing machine? You figure it’ll probably never get cold enough around here for a washing machine to need to be dripped, that’s how.
I prepared to run a large load of no clothes, using cold water only. Check, here came the water. Now a hot load. Nothing, not even a drip. Son of a bitch!
This time it took two extension cords from the garage in order to reach the offending frozen pipe with the right tool for the job. About 7 feet of hot-water pipe was perfectly exposed to the frigid wind that had been howling up under the house for the past day and a half, and now that length of pipe felt like ice. Could Santa’s magic hair dryer overcome all odds and bring happiness to the washing machine before the pipe burst and showered angry ice over all my beautiful wickedness?
It could. And did, after a good 20 minutes of blow-drying. I felt warmth in the pipe within my grasp, then crawled backwards on my belly, gingerly so as not to squash my cell phone, and emerged, weary and webbed with cobs but triumphant, just as the first pink sign of sun made its mark upon the eastern horizon. I went inside and enjoyed the best damn cup of coffee I have ever had. Then I washed several loads of clothes to keep the pipes from freezing up again.
There are 8 million stories in the Texas Outback; this has been one of them.
→ B.Dunn, Jan 09, 2010, 09 23 am
Making Hay Out Of A Sow's Ear
(Medical • The Duh Files)
Now that my family, the neighbors, my kids’ school teachers, our cousins, their school teachers, their friends, the churches, our acquaintances in Dallas, their churches, their places of employment, their work-out gyms – now that half of Texas has already caught The Other White Meat Flu and passed it on – now the vaccine arrives.
If you can call 142,000 doses in a state with just shy of 25 million people an arrival. I’d call it a joke, if there was a funny punchline. In Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, they got 600 doses. San Antonio got 500. According to reports, no one has been allowed to snort any of this nasal-mist version yet. I hear the governor’s office is making a list of Really Super Important People first.
“Clearly at this point, where we have only some vaccine and not everybody can receive that vaccine, demand is outstripping supply, said Centers of Disease Control
Because duh, by the time Texas’ share of the stuff appears on the horizon, every last one of us will have had the pandemic. (See earlier rant here; I’m not in the mood to launch into this one again.)
Except to briefly re-mention that the CDC’s reliance on a tiny handful of vaccine-making companies has not only resulted in swine flu vaccine not arriving until no one needs it any more, it has also caused a shortage of seasonal flu vaccine.
Which is why it was so heartening to see Sugar Land Mayor Jimmy Thompson turning the pandemic scare into a marketing moment.
“Mayor Leads by Example to Encourage Flu Prevention,” the press-release headline said. Turns out the city health director was able to scrape up enough seasonal flu vaccine to give Jimmy a shot.
It was a “measure intended as a public relations stunt health alert to encourage citizens to follow the mayor’s example,” we are told, even though it turns out a lot of us couldn’t follow the mayor’s example if we wanted to, because there’s a shortage or absence of both vaccines.
As for city “public health authority” Dr. Joe Anzaldua, he helpfully tells us, “Taking advantage of both vaccinations combined with simple precautionary hygiene may well prevent a rapid and widespread outbreak in our community.”
Except for the fact that we’re already in the middle of one.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 07, 2009, 03 51 pm
We Have Met The Enemy
(The Duh Files • )
You can tighten down your electricity usage, grow your own fruit and veggies to eat better and save money, divert rainwater for your own use, batten down your home’s hatches for energy savings, dump your gas guzzlers for boring generic gas-saving Toyotas and stop eating out at restaurants to pinch your pennies and bank up against the possibility of hard times.
But if you can’t stop yourself from being a general dumb-ass, what’s the point?
I refer specifically to water, at least this stupid time around. For starters, we’ve just had six weeks straight of almost no rain and 97-104 degree heat. Our drought is so severe that the government drought measurers had to come up with a new negative superlative to describe it (exceptional, they’re calling it). It’s so hot that if you try to water a plant in the afternoon, half the water floats away in the form of steam before it hits the ground.
On top of that, my little town is among those mandated, by quasi-governmental edict of some sort, to have to convert from wells to treated Brazos River surface water for drinking purposes in the near future. So to pay for the monster treatment plants they’re going to need to turn that Brazos slime into something allegedly drinkable, Richmond, Texas has more than doubled the price of drinking water for the citizenry over the past five years.
In my imagination, I am conserving water, and walking a fine line between keeping my garden vegetables alive and allowing them to melt into the hot ground.
In the real world, I arose early this morning to give them a much-needed drink. When I went around to the side yard to turn on the water, the water already was turned on.
Nice.
Especially nice because I knew I hadn’t watered the morning before. (The morning before, I was up early getting the kids ready for their little summer vacation Bible school classes so I could get across town in time to see a doctor about my aching back and eventually learn that I am in constant pain because I am now an official Old Guy.)
So, as I was running through the back yard toward the end of what I knew was a cash-spewing hose, I calculated that the water must have been turned on full blast no later than the evening before yesterday morning – or about 36 hours – and possibly even the prior morning – or 48 hours.
I’d left the hose stuck in a little kiddie pool I’d been trying to fill as a way of bribing the birds into not pecking holes in so many figs and blackberries back there. The theory, put forth by certain gardening “experts” from places far away from here, is that the birds are just thirsty, and if you give them plenty to drink, they could care less about that inconvenient but juicy fruit. Turns out, in semi-South Texas at least, that’s pure bullshit. But I digress and am dutifully at least a tiny bit sorry for having done so. Back at the little kiddie pool, the water was dutifully seeping over the top like it had been for 36 to 48 hours.
Luckily, gallon after gallon was running right where it was most needed – around the foundation of a crappy shed the previous owners left out in back to store the neighborhood hornets and rodents.
A small amount also was trickling toward one of my blackberry plants. I’m not kidding, all the berries on that plant are now four times the size of the berries on the neighboring plants. I’m thinking if I just drench the others in $400 worth of water, I’ll have the most gi-normous blackberries in Richmond, Texas.
The best part about the whole episode was the part where I had to go ahead and continue using up a zillion more gallons of water on the actual garden about 10 yards away, which was dry as a bone but could’ve happily soaked up all that wasted water had the little kiddie pool been positioned just a few feet south of its actual location.
Later I went inside, bent over and asked my kids to kick me right in the butt.
→ B.Dunn, Jul 17, 2009, 05 58 am
Email From Twits
(The Duh Files • Verbatim)
You are receiving this email because of your relationship with Harris County Toll Road Authority.Harris County Toll Road Authority would like to continue providing you with email communications. This automated message is being sent to confirm this is your working email address.
Please do not reply as no action is necessary.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Harris County Toll Road Authority
Clouseau: “I thought you said your dog did not bite!”
Hotel Clerk: “That is not my dog.”
→ B.Dunn, Apr 28, 2009, 07 55 pm
