It's snowing...

I used to love it when it snowed, when I was a kid. We lived in an apartment in the city, so there was really no heavy lifting to be done by anyone in our family as far as shoveling away the snow was concerned, although my dad did buy a wholly inadequate shovel to extract the car, for those rare occasions when the car had to be dug out. (Indeed, it occurs to me that I earned my first dollar from a stranger with that shovel, clearing away snow in that delicious period between the end of school and the arrival of my parents from work.)

But I digress, sort of.

I really have not much use for snow these days. I don't do winter sports. My one real experience on skis ended with my failing to come out of a turn, which pointed me directly downhill and accelerating, too petrified to attempt to deliberately fall down. How I stayed on my feet should probably be classified as a miracle, but for the fact that I managed to miss colliding with everyone else on the mountain between my starting point and a rather tight chain link fence that separated idiots like me from the parking lot. Now, that was a miracle!

But again, I digress.

My pouring hot water down our sewer pipe hasn't done all that much. Galina called a local plumber, who reported that our symptoms were fairly common, and that he could solve our problem with a special device that he has, for a price, naturally. He's scheduled to come by this afternoon, some time.

I took Baby to the vet this morning, to be put down. Her kidneys have been failing for some time, and I'll spare you the details of recent, um, developments. In her condition, she was not a happy cat and frankly, hasn't been for some time, and we were not happy cat owners. Despite the fact that I've never been able to bond with cats in the way I seem to with dogs, I still feel bad about this, but the alternative is not pleasant to think about, either.

Two small rush jobs are in the mill, and I'm just taking a short break between them to post this entry.

Cheers...

Water update, I think...

Snow quickly turns our lovely sweeping driveway into a bloody nightmare, and the plumber apparently couldn't navigate his way up the hill. So, I continued to heat large pots of water to near-boiling and pour them down various drains, hoping against hope that the heated water wasn't going to crack something in the process.

However, before I could do that, I had to find a way to empty the shower pan downstairs. I ended up using our 100-foot long hose as a siphon, with one end shoved down the drain as far as it would go, and the other stretched out the garage door, across the concrete pad where we park the cars, and out in a direction that goes downhill the fastest.

I learned the technique of priming such an animal, which involves constricting (but not blocking) the downhill end, filling the hose from the uphill end (from a faucet), quickly shoving the uphill end into the drain before too much water escapes from the interior of the hose, and then removing the constriction from the downhill end. This procedure took a few tries to get down, so I can probably add about a half mile of walking (repeatedly, from one end of the hose to the other, and back) to the day's exercise bill.

I'm pretty sure the line is unblocked now, so I may have saved $250. I should probably make sure the plumber knows not to come tomorrow, except that I don't know who to call. Galina's return from the store ought to solve that problem.

Cheers...

UPDATE: Strange water line behavior. When I dropped a couple of gallons of hot water through the hall toilet, it went through the system like grain through a goose, no problem. Flushing the same commode an hour later results in water in the shower pan. We lost water pressure late in the day (probably associated with a brownout/blackout that occurred earlier in the day), which made fussing with the system a pain. The water pressure is back, and I'll start over tomorrow.