Ted's Blog

Today a friend at work needed a small philips head screwdriver to change the batteries in a calculator. I got my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket and opened up the Philips head screwdriver/bottle opener. When he returned it to me, he had it still open and asked me if I was superstitious. I knew something was up, but didn’t know what it was. He explained that there is a superstition that if someone gives you a knife open, you are supposed to return it open. If they give it to you closed, you are supposed to return it closed. I had never heard of that, but another person who saw what was going on confirmed he had been taught that too.

I tried to look this up and see if I could find the origins of it, but all I found was that it is apparently a southern thing. I also found another superstition that it is bad luck if someone gives you a knife because it will supposedly sever the relationship. But you can mitigate the bad luck by “paying” for the knife by giving them a quarter. I thought that was pretty funny.

Today they officially closed our office. Yesterday, under a different governor, they said stay off the streets but wanted us to come to work. I was going to walk to MARTA today if I had to work, but everything was a sheet of ice this morning. People were taking their sleds out to the middle of my street and sliding all the way down the hill, so driving wouldn’t have been a good option. Still, a few people in SUV’s were making it up the hill.

I took the dogs for a walk late this morning and there were a few guys shoveling their sidewalks and driveways. Knowing that it is going to get even colder, that seemed like a pretty good idea. Otherwise all of the slush would just re-freeze. So for the first time in my life, I shoveled snow. Really I just shoveled ice (and it wasn’t hard because it was starting to melt). I just did a path up my driveway so the dogs and I could get footing and one line of my car’s wheels would have traction. I couldn’t get rid of the ice without either throwing it on my neighbor’s yard or throwing it in my yard where the hard shell of sleet we got yesterday would make it slide back down to the driveway. So it is just on the other side of the driveway from the cleared path. Then I went ahead and did my sidewalk, which turned out to be pretty ugly because there were leaves and dirt underneath the snow and when I flipped all of that over the pretty white blanket of snow was ruined. One of the neighbors had done a better job of keeping a nice clean, perfectly edged sidewalk before it snowed and his cleared sidewalk looks magnificent. But mine works just as well.

I think it will be back to work tomorrow.

I got a few inches of snow last night and this morning it was covered with a sheet of sleet. Katie does not like this because when she takes a step her foot breaks through the thin layer of sleet and into the snow below that. She walks through it very carefully.

Outside my kitchen window is a tree (maybe a big shrub) with green leaves and bunches of red berries. There were hundreds of birds checking it out today. These birds were really pretty with black masks, bright yellow trim on their tails, and bright red spots on their wings. I’m pretty sure they are cedar waxwings after looking them up in my bird guide. You can see in the picture why they are called waxwings: it looks like their tails and wings are dipped in melted crayons. I’m not so sure about the tree, but I’m thinking it could be a cotoneaster. There was also one robin trying to keep all of the waxwings away from his tree, but he didn’t seem to be eating very fast. Better just to eat.

Here is another one a couple of years later:

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”