Busy

Watching football while replacing all the plumbing under the kitchen sink. Trap is clogged, and while we were renting it a decade ago, some idiot glued in two-inch ABS down there that’s impossible to get apart without cutting it off. It will give me a chance to get the disposal off to replace the old web in its throat, and put in separate traps for each sink, plus make it much easier to work on in the future.

[Monday-morning update]

Well, that turned into an adventure. Ended up replacing everything under the sink, including disposal, and still not sure I solved the drain problem, and won’t know until I go get an extension for the dishwasher drain hose.

[Monday-morning update]

Got all the plumbing put together, and determined that the drain problem was indeed downstream. Just paid a plumber $160 to snake it, and now it’s running clear. All in all, job cost about $450, but that included a powerful quiet new disposal. Hate to think what a plumber would have charged to do everything I did.

7 thoughts on “Busy”

  1. It feels pretty darn great to step away knowing you’ve done a good job. You deserve a beer but I don’t know if you’ve ever mentioned whether you do or don’t partake.

    Any kneelers today? I’ve given up on watching US football this year.

  2. I’m guessing Saturday = college football. No kneelers in in college football that I’m aware of, but the weather’s been too nice to notice.

    Undersink plumbing might be a PITA but done moderately right it lasts forever, even with tenants. And it’s easy for an amateur to do right. 25 years ago I redid the undersink plumbing with ABS going into cast iron and haven’t had a problem with it since. Yeah, every ten years or so I have a tenant try to chop up a dozen egg’s worth of shells in the disposal and clogs the pipe up downstream, but my handy-dandy Harbor Freight drill-powered snake takes care of that in a half an hour.

    No more calling drain cleaner services.

  3. I tried watching a couple of American football games, but this:
    “An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.”
    https://qz.com/150577/an-average-nfl-game-more-than-100-commercials-and-just-11-minutes-of-play/

    That probably sounds like I’m bashing the US but; compare it to the more constant and flowing action of other forms of football – soccer and rugby, I was surprised at the continued popularity of the American version of the game in America and am unsurprised that efforts to export it have largely failed.

    1. The continuous motion of games like soccer, basketball, hockey, etc. are what I hate about them. They seem to be for people with ADHD. Football and baseball are more like chess, with time to contemplate the next move.

      1. Each sport has its good points and bad points, soccer has long periods when the ball is kicked around with each team looking for opportunities to breach the opponents defense, which can make 95% of the game pretty boring with only a few goals as climaxes of the game, basketball is the opposite, because the scoring is so continuous each basket isn’t that important. There are no exceptional highlights except when the clock is counting down in a really close game. Rugby is I think half way between soccer and American football, there’s a lot of speed and variation, with quick back play but there’s also set pieces at line-outs and scrums where the strategy to be used in the next move becomes important. Rugby, like American football, also has more specialization in the skill set required in each of the positions on the field, backs are fast with good ball skills, forwards are big men “doing the hard yards” in the scrums, rucks and mauls.

    2. Here’s one way to think of it.

      Baseball and football are non-continuous sports–that is, they are built around discrete actions called “plays” (a snap in football, or a pitch in baseball). Outside of each play, little or no action takes place (there are exceptions, like the pick-off or going hurry-up to preserve clock or wear down the defense).

      Because of this, these two sports feature athletes who go all out, then get a chance to rest. Meanwhile in most continuous-flow sports, each athlete has to choose how hard to push their bodies at any given moment, since it’s impossible to sustain maximum human effort for more than a few seconds.

      So, would you rather watch athletes going all-out for a few seconds at a time, or athletes playing continuously but at far below their maximum performance?

  4. I’ve never been able to figure out the rules for rugby which is what “football” is called in New South Wales and Queensland.
    Any sport that features something called a “try” doesn’t have much going for it. I’ve seen very little of it but it seems to me the game could be greatly improved by eliminating the ball. Just have the aim to run as many of your team through the enemy goal as you can.

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