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").



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   perfunctory mask wearing
Thursday, May 7 2020
So far I haven't been able to rotate the anode nut at the top of our new heat-pump-powered hot water heater. Today Gretchen escalatated it to Rycor, the guys who installed it (and all the splits) back in November. The guy on the phone was helpful and, on hearing the progress we had made, suggested all we needed was a pipe on our breaker bar. I explained that I'd tried that, but that, because of the extension needed, the socket tended to walk off the anode's unnecessarily-shallowed 1 1/16 inch nut. So the Rycor guy suggested one of us pull the pipe while the other kept the extension vertical. So, what the hell, we thought we'd give it a try. I assigned Gretchen to work on the end of a very long pipe, which would greatly amplify her force, while I kept the 16 inches (or so) of extension vertical. Everything seemed to be working at first, but then the socket came off the nut. This happened twice, and when I next looked at the nut, it looked like three or four of its six corners had been stripped. When we called the Rycor guy, he agreed that this was a terrible development. Still, he thought there might be hope if perhaps someone could hammer a smaller socket onto the stripped nut (since it was, as I told him, at the bottom of a well and resistant to being sanded). The Rycor guy said he'd send someone out tomorrow to see if he could unstick that anode nut, though he said maybe I should first get a range of sockets that could be hammered over it.
This evening after work, Gretchen returned home from a doggy date with Falafel Cathy and her dog (he has an ugly Hebrew name), and the Nissan Leaf only had about 14 miles left in the battery. So, on a socket-buying errand, I drove out to Home Depot in the Prius (the first time anyone had driven it since the day we got the Leaf). Only Ramona came with me, as Neville was busy with a bone-chewing project.
I stopped first at AutoZone, but they didn't have any appropriate sockets. Everyone there was wearing masks, but some employees were only doing it perfunctorily, not bothering to pull the mask up over their nose. I saw similar mask behavior by employees at the UPS Store in nearby Kings Plaza (I was only there to find out where in that plaza the FedEx dropoff was). One of the guys wearing his mask that way wandered to the back and loudly sneezed.
Along with some electrical supplies for the Nissan Leaf charging station project, I managed to get what I thought was the right socket at Home Depot, though their six-point sockets were special black-painted thick-walled items designed for use with impact wrenches. While in the area, I also drove out to Lowes to see what sort of sockets they had. Overall, I wasn't impressed with the selection; I feel like I personally have a better selection of sockets than is available at any one of those three stores.


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