Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   code like that doesn't want to be understood
Friday, January 4 2019
I had a pretty good day at work as I continued untangling the ball of Python code I am rewriting as an Electron app in Angular/Node.js. Towards the end of the day I encountered a confusing issue where a collection of entities called "rates" was being specified, believe it or not, as Rates.rates.rates. Code like that doesn't want to be understood.
I ate a frozen vegan pot pie for lunch today, but before that I drove down to William's Lumber (on US 9 just north of Rhinebeck) mostly to buy the PVC needed to install the kitchen sink's drainage system. I'd brought a number of pieces with me to be sure I was getting things in the correct sizes.

On the way home from work tonight, I cracked open a big Anti-Hero IPA from the Stewarts on the south end of Red Hook and made it my road beer. I went out of my way on the drive home to visit the Tibetan Center's thrift store, but they had nothing I wanted. What would've been really useful would've been a single electric burner, which would make our kitchen full-function until the gas line is installed.
Back at the house, it turned out I didn't really have precisely what I needed. One always forgets the simple coupling fittings for joining two pipes of the same diameter. I was forced to make due with the fittings I'd bought combined with those in the milk crate in which I store all the random small PVC fittings I've accumulated over the past sixteen years.
I kept having problems with leaks that suddenly subsided when I included a soft plastic gasket I'd been leaving out between the plastic tail piece and the strainer. Once I had it all hooked up, I realized I'd totally forgotten the trap, which is necessary to keep sewer gas from coming up the drainage pipe (though I hadn't been noticing any bad smells). I would've remembered the trap had the demolition team not put what they'd removed out on the east deck where I couldn't find it. Otherwise I would've tried to recreate what had been, including the trap. Fortunately, I actually had what I needed to make a trap, and a side effect of that was that the sink's tail piece entered the system with less stress on it.
After that, Gretchen helped me with taping and mudding all the cuts in the drywall that Colin had had to make to install the heavy metal brackets that will support a series of "floating shelves." The metal brackets are made of 3/8 inch steel and are bolted so securely to the studs in the wall that they could support a human standing on them while barely flexing at all.
A final kitchen chore of the evening would've been installing the InSinkerator boiling water tap. But I couldn't find anything in the instructions about what pipe was supposed to be attached to the household plumbing. Unless it was making water from condensation, it would need some sort of water input. Fortunately, there's always YouTube when mysteries such as this present themselves. I learned that the water needed to enter the system via a thin copper pipe, though the one supplied looked to be too short to reach any of the sources of water available beneath the sink.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190104

feedback
previous | next