Year: 2011

My shower has dripped since it was originally installed. I should have had it fixed back then, but now I have waited too late. In the meantime, the pressure was never that great and it seems like it has gotten really miserable lately. I know that new fixtures are low flow, but this is well below anything like that. I screwed the showerhead off to see if there was anything blocking that. There was some little pieces of rust or grit that you might typically find, but removing that didn’t do anything to improve the situation. Even with the showerhead off, there wasn’t much water coming out of the pipe.

The diverter in the main bathroom tub (switches between tub and shower) had failed and I wound up getting a new part from American Standard that fixed it. So I was thinking maybe I needed new parts for the shower as well and wanted to take apart the handles to see if I could figure out the problem. I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do anything that would make me get into the wall because I don’t have an access panel for the shower. But if solder was blocking the pipes or grout had gotten in there, that might be the only way to fix it. So first I needed to turn the water off and the easiest way to do that for me is at the street. Once it was off I wanted to drain the water out of the shower so it wouldn’t get on me when I took the handles apart, so I opened up an outside spigot that is lower than the shower fixture (a bunch of water came out because the expansion tank pushes water out as the system pressure is relieved) and then went inside and turned the shower on. This allowed water to drain out of the outside spigot and suck in air through the shower.

Continue reading “Plumbing”

This afternoon I met Nicole and Seda at CNN Center for lunch and then we went to the World of Coca Cola. I hadn’t gotten to talk to Seda at New Year’s, so I was glad to get to know her a little before she flew off to California. She and Nicole kept looking for Armenian Coke stuff in the museum, but never really found anything. I pointed out they usually make a big deal about Thailand because they have a different alphabet that Coke can use to show how international it is. And we did see a few things, plus the tasting room had several drinks from Thailand. No such luck with Armenia, but they thought maybe they found one poster from Georgia (the Georgia near Armenia), but couldn’t make out all the letters.

After we went through the exhibits (mostly about Coke advertising, but they have a working bottling plant that makes bottles of coke that they give you at the end; I think they have the bottling machine on its slowest setting), the 4D theater (about what makes Coke so wonderful), and then 2 short movies about Coke advertising, Seda observed that she had paid money to have Coca Cola advertise to her for a couple of hours. And we hadn’t even gotten to the gift shop yet! At the gift shop, I said now they will sell you things that you will wear or put in your house that will advertise Coke to everyone you know. She seemed to think this was an American phenomenon.

But I bought some Coke glasses made of iconic green glass. They weren’t the traditional soda glass shape, but a flared or trumpet shape that I thought was pretty neat. When I got outside they had a statue of Dr. John Pemberton, Coke’s inventor (he died only two years after inventing it, but not before selling the recipe; I told Nicole that maybe the Coke owners had him killed before he could sell the recipe to anyone else), serving Coke in the same kind of glass I had just bought (only his were bronze, because he was bronze).