And Finally – I Can Write!

��I have been having one of those weeks where everything else gets in the way of doing what I want…namely writing.

I last wrote on Tuesday – then life got in the way.

On Wednesday … I – uh .. you know what? ��I don’t even remember what happened Wednesday!

 

 

Thursday I had to go and get food for the live stock, and then when I got back from that, I had to cut wood all afternoon, because my wife was going to be out of the house for most of Friday and I have a firm rule about using chainsaws when I’m alone – I don’t!

So I had to cut a lot of wood so that –

 

 

Friday, I drove my wife to where she was going (so I could have the truck) then spend the afternoon chopping up all the wood I cut the day before into usable pieces, (and throw into truck to drive them a bit closer to the furnace – not much mind you due to this damn snow).

I came in from that, peeled off my sweat soaked clothes, and being chilled, was going to run a bath to soak my poor muscles and warm up (I got hot enough to sweat and outside was cold enough��it just��turned to chilled water)

While I was standing there, in not but my underwear, I heard a strange sound. I walked about the living room trying to isolate it. When I did, I got a sinking feeling in my gut, and suspecting the worse, put on new clothes to find out…. I was right.

The water pipe that runs to the outdoor tap was leaking. Right where the pipe ran into the wall outside, it had clearly cracked.

I pulled up some of the frozen (and thus already damaged) hose and cut it off, as far from the house as I could. I melted the frozen water inside with a propane torch… it wasn’t like I could damage the hose anymore by melting it… and tried to get the water to run out into the yard instead of where it had been, along the wall and under the house. My plan worked…somewhat. The majority of the water now ran into the yard, but some was still running under the house. So the ducks were very happy and started bathing. I, on the other hand, was not.

I knew I had to go under the house, in the crawlspace, and fix the pipe. Not what I wanted to do after already wearing myself out chopping wood. I tried to tell myself I could leave it and do it tomorrow – but even I didn’t buy that.

����So I searched through the plumbing supplies I had on hand and found a tap with a compression fitting end– no soldering required. I gathered the tools needed and, with a sigh of regret, did my best combat crawl imitation and got under the house. The bad pipe was, of course, on the opposite side from the way under the house. The good news was that the entire thing wasn’t flooded. And there are styrofoam sheets under there, which when placed one on top of another, kept me from being totally soaked in the cold water. (it doesn’t freeze because heat from the pipes in the floor radiate down, as well as up, thus – in most cases – keeping the pipes under the house from freezing.)

The job got done with little trouble (a minor miracle there) and I crawled back out. I was sore, tired, and done in – time to put the sheep to bed, feed the fowls, tend��the furnace, and go get my wife.

 

 

This morning, with no leaking pipes (knock on wood), enough wood cut and chopped to last a couple days, and nowhere I had to go, I could could write … which meant -for the first time in four days- I didn’t really feel like it.

But I did it anyways. Damn right I did! Who knows what tomorrow’s going to bring!

Filed under: Writing Tagged: ducks, fowl, furnace, heat, sheep, truck, water, wife, wood, writing