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one poo-bedeviled rump
Wednesday, September 28 2005
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York, USA
Early this morning I made a run to Herzog's hardware in Uptown Kingston to buy a bleedable ball valve that would allow me to repair that obstinately-leaking solder joint in the slab hydronic zone. I'd either have to install this valve in the slab loop or drain the solar heating loop. The slab loop is connected to the solar loop through a gate valve and an electric valve, but, without draining the solar loop, it lacked any method to bleed off the joint-ruining water vapor that would inevitably accumulate once I started soldering.
Once home, I rolled up my sleeves and began installing the ball valve. It was an complex procedure that began with me hacksawing through the one-inch-diameter slab supply pipe (which runs vertically close against the west basement wall). When I soldered on the new ball valve and repaired the defective joint, I used plenty of heat for a long time. It takes awhile to fully-heat an inch-wide brass fitting, even with MAPP gas; I'm sure this is why the joint was defective in the first place. The problem with this sort of work is that you never know how good the joints are until the system is pressurized with water, but once it is pressurized and found defective, it takes a lot of work to get the water out, a necessary step before resoldering the joints. As I'm learning, you can never have too many bleedable valves in a complex system like this.
All this plumbing work took me a good hour and a half. Happily, once I pressurized the system I found the leak had vanished. Unfortunately, though, when I went to make the electrical settings that would allow the water to be heated by oil during my two week absence, strange things happened with the various valves. Mostly they were on when they shouldn't have been and I couldn't imagine how the electricity was getting to them. It was as if they were haunted. Obviously I'd done something wrong or made a bad assumption when I was wiring them up, but it was too late to unravel the mess now. I was forced to hardwire the system so it would heat water for the next two weeks of house sitters. Even then, I wasn't completely confident about it as Gretchen and I were driving away to the Brooklyn.
We left our car with Nancy in Park Slope, though it would be ending up with a friend of hers for the duration of our trip. We were waiting for a car service on Union Street when Gretchen flagged down a taxicab that got us to JFK with time to spare.
While waiting for our flight, we killed some time (and money) at an airport restaurant eating mediocre overpriced food and alcoholic drinks. I flipped open my iBook to check for WiFi possibilities and found there were some, but none appeared to be free or inadvertently left open.
Our flight to Tel Aviv was via Turkish Airlines, with a scheduled four hour layover in Istanbul. Heading eastward, opposite the sun, we advanced quickly across the time zones. Our seats were cramped and there weren't individual television screens allowing us to idle away the miles (particularly the forever it takes to fly over Nova Scotia). On the plus side, there was maybe one baby on the entire airplane, and its poo-bedeviled rump was seated far, far away, allowing me to sleep for something like six hours in neck-cramping comfort.
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