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highly vexing leak Sunday, November 9 2014
Down in Tampa, Florida, Gretchen decided to trade in an earlier and more convenient flight back to New York for a $500 credit, though she immediately regretted it. Still, she'd found a happy pill in her box of "flight aids" and it was making it all better as she talked to me about it on the phone. She also told me that Deborah had flaked out on renting our house, which is exactly her modus operandi: she gets excited about and loves things until the moment she can have them, and at that instant she loses interest. It also happens to her boyfriends, some of whom fall madly in love with her. In this case, at least we'd been a little ambivalent about renting our house to a friend at a discount.
This evening I needed to get some catfood (the only place it can be bought on a Sunday evening is Petsmart), and while in town, I dropped briefly by the Wall Street house mostly so I could put trash and recycling out on the curb. Though I wasn't there long, it was long enough to detect a tiny (and highly vexing) leak in the big three inch shit pipe that carries waste away from the new toilet in the half bathroom. Evidently one of my fittings hadn't sealed completely. What to do? Later, back at the house, I found a product called Leak-b-Gone which would be perfect for this fix. It's just a broken ring that slides over the pipe, locks shut, and can be primed and glued against a poorly-glued joint between a pipe and a fitting. But Leak-B-Gone is expensive and difficult to find even on the web, so this evening I made my own version (possibly infringing on a patent in the process). I cut a 3/8 inch long piece of 3 inch PVC and then cut out a sector of about a third of it to make a C-shape. I could snugly snap this over the 3 inch pipe from which it had been made, and presumably once primed, glued, and pressed up against the leak it would work as well as Leak-B-Gone (assuming the leak is in the 66% of joint that it can occlude). We'll have to see.
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