There you go - sister and new brother-in-law. The wedding was in Bloomington, IN. From the Twin Cities it is about 10ish hours to Indianapolis, then another hour and a half or so south to Bloomington.
We noticed the kitchen drain peeing when I offered to show some friends our alternate toilet in the basement. I opened the door to point out that one could relieve themselves here should the other restroom be in use only to notice greasy water raining down from the joists. A couple of days later when Mel and I had time to actually begin to address the situation I was on the way out to the garage to get some tools to begin tearing stuff apart. As I passed through our back yard our neighbor Brandt spoke to me: "How's it going?" I complained of our situation, and Brandt began to tell me all the things I should do. 'Well, you TALK a pretty good game,' I thought. "Wanna come in and have a look?" As soon as he had a chance to check it out he started talking about how I need one of these, and some of that, and just do this... and he had tomorrow afternoon off and how about he just pick up the parts? I must admit that I felt a bit odd about this development. But he showed up with all sorts of PVC plumbing stuff. While I was out getting a tape measure Brandt pulled about a 5 ft section of pipe off of my basement ceiling. Don't leave Brandt alone in your house. But we managed to fit in the replacement PVC with some rubbery joints to mate it to the existing metal pipe. In the future I'll have an idea about how to accomplish this sort of thing, but choosing which joints to use and how to place them to connect two non-rectalinearly oriented bits of pipe seems like a question of instinct. This one might actually be "Neighbor Brandt: 1, House: 0"
This one showed up Sunday night. Mel was doing laundry. I was slacking. Or maybe I was being useful, I don't remember. But Mel came up and asked me why the spin cycle might not work on our laundry machine. "The load is probably unbalanced," I said, wondering how my wife might not know this. Relief is not what I felt when I learned that the problem was not an unbalanced load. In a clothesless test run the washing machine fills up with water and then makes noises like it's running, but the agitator turns not. Thankfully the machine is capable of pumping the water in it back out, at least. We get out our 'fixin stuff in yer house' book (and the samurai fixit website linked by Mel) and have a look. Tilting the beast forward we are able to get a look at the intimate bits of our major appliance. There was a lot of shredded plastic laying under it. We were able to discern that the coupler - isolation disk - coupler assembly between the motor and the transmission had shredded itself. A few days later, about $16 dollars bought us a new assebly for our Whirlpool Cleantouch washer at Dey Appliance Parts.
Can you guess what this is? I'll blog more about it when I've fixed it. Grrr.
There really is a bunny in this picture. He's just a little bitty bunny, and he lives in our raspberry patch. It's fun to look for him in the morning when I leave for work; sometimes he's out then. I scared him the other day, and he's too young to really know what to do, so he just kind of jumped spastically in circles for a minute.
Our raspberries are growing and growing. Thank goodness for Greg and Sara Feinburg, who gave us a short primer on what to do with them in the fall. Greg also spent some time telling us which plants were weeds. Handy folks, those Feinburgs.
It's been much too hot to do anything but the most pressing house projects. Like, fix the leaky drain pipe so that it doesn't dump dirty water all over the basement. That will get fixed tomorrow, and then we'll be able to wash our dishes again. Hurrah! Thankfully, the bathroom sink still works fine, so when I need to wash red wine out of my white shirt, I can do that. It's times like this that I really miss the backstage work. Red wine + black shirt = who cares?
We had a very nice 4th of July, ending with the fireworks up at the park. We could see the fireworks by the Stone Arch Bridge, which started at 10pm. The Powderhorn fireworks started about five minutes later, but then ran at least 15 minutes longer. It was a good display, and I was glad that we had gone. It was much more relaxing to be able to walk there, and walk home, and avoid the crazy traffic. Thanks to everyone who stopped by the house to visit!
We moved! Very heartfelt thanks to Mom and Dad Lam, Kay Kwang and Sara Ochs (photographer, not pictured) for helping us! Mom did a lot of work in the kitchen, cleaning and putting dishes away so that we could all eat and drink when not carrying boxes or furniture. Now, if I can only find where she put everything, we'll be okay. The week so far has been spent on organization and creation of infrastructure. Dad and I put together the wall of shelving in the mudroom/pantry. Mom continued to clean and put away in the kitchen. Adam made sure that the cable modem got re-connected before his big online gaming night with the guys from college. We all have our priorities.
For the 4th of July, we're looking foward to having some friends over and then walking to Powderhorn Park for music and fireworks. Hopefully, we'll have some nice weather, so we can call escape the kitchen when Sara is making Lard of Heaven. Mmmm. That'll keep the mosquitos away....
*ring*
