THE BATTLE for SERENITY (or how I learned to stop worrying and love leaky pipes)

So the plumber tore the wall opened and replaced the old shower unit. So he did not replace the wall.

I have to say with some pride that Liz and I (I mostly under her instruction) replaced the dry wall (including cut it to size and peared holes in it for the spout and shower knob), installed it, adheased the shower plastic back onto it and cleaned it all up.

That was the first small victory.

The second was that when we turned the water on nothing exploded or sprayed or otherwise went horridly.

The thrid victory was that the new shower pieces worked.

The only remaining concern is that the shower spout still leaks somewhat. FAR FAR less than before but it is still leaking. I might get the plumber to come back if only because he's now relatively familiar with teh system. I also no longer think this new small leak will require him to pull out the wall again as we've done that. I'm convinced that the problem now is is somwhere in how we installed the hand knob or the the shower spout.

I think we're almost there but at least now the drips are by drop and not by stream! The way they were before.

The fun of a house... ARE YOU LISTENING MARK! :) Hey... at least we're in this together now.

Cheers,

P

PS OFF TO GERMANY TOMORROW WITH A STOP OVER IN LONDON. HUZZAH!

LEAKS AND MORE FLIGHTS

We've been having trouble with the faucet on the shower in the house for some time now. With some creative manoevering the thing would turn off and on just fine. While I was in Kenya however the inevitable happend and the shower faucet just kept leaking.

My first task at home after beign gone for 2 weeks in a foreign country, with a crazy schedule and after a 20hr flight home was to help liz fix the faucet. We thought this would be fairly stragithtforward.

Buy new faucet set, peel back the wall, remove the old one and replace it. It was not to be. The old was apparently was VERY OLD and is saudered to the water pipes so we couldn't remove it. All that was Monday.

Tuesday we went to home depot with the offending unit and asked if they could just replace it so we could keep the existing faucet but with a new knob of similar design. It was too old and they had nothing that would fit or replace the offending unit. After creatign a makeshift solution with existing parts we went home to try it. No dice, it leaked worse than before.

Back to home depot to get an allan key so we could replace the new makeshift parts with the original parts. We did this. it still leaked worse.

We called Mr. Rooter to come on Wednesday. They cancelled. We were pissed. The faucet continued to leak. Liz called another guy, he said he'd be there on thursday morning. We went out to see a play and supper with friends.

Today: The guy showed up. He could not fix the faucet... it was too old. He was however able to replace the old unit with the new one we had bought on monday. The total cost should be somewhere around $500. Tonigth we have to go and replace the dry wall the plumber guy had to tear out to replace the unit (and because tby this point there was leakage and the wall would have gotten mouldy if we just re caulked the showerwall to the board.

This sucks. Granted I half expected the electrical to go, or the washer and dryer outlets to be attached to nothing causing flooding long before this happened (due to my mistrust of the guy who sold us the house). So given what I thought 'could' have happened this really isn't so bad. I just hope it is not an omen of more things to come!

So I just hope we can get all of this repaired as I'm flying to Germany on Saturday. Fun times. One good thing is that I get to see my friend Hazim in london. I'm staying in London sunday night.

Cheers,

P

BACK FROM KENYA

It was a whirlwind trip, the meetings were reasonable and the weather, although wet was better than here.

As I'm still readjusting to the time shift and trying to deal with a leaky shower a very short review of the trip follows:


Didn't get out as much as I would have liked but I did make it to one national park for a day trip, met about half my grad class (one girl from who lives in kenya, the delegation of lebanon was my buddy youssef, and one of the alberta environment guys was also at the LSE when I was there).

Conference objectives were met, I kept my head down and away from the the higher ups, it was nice to see John Godfrey again, gave the Bloc MP a backhanded compliment and Still had time to talk down a nice extortionist with a badge and a rather large machine gun in the middle of the night... Good times.

Cheers,

P

OFF TO KENYA

Yes you heard me. I'm going to Toronto tonight and Kenya tomorrow for two weeks.

I expect you'll hear about this meeting in the press if only a little over the next two weeks. Also the 'Ministry of War and Spin' (a former employer of mine) is in fine fine form, I honestly did not think it was possible to be even more paranoid and obnoxious than they were at the meetings in May... oh how wrong I was. Seriously where do they find these people.

Oh and a funny story liz told me yesterday.

Liz: sitting at a computer at school
Crazy girl: HI! *(in uber chipper fashion)
Liz: ...hello...
Crazy girl: HI! HOW AER YOU!!!! (in uber chipper fasion)
Liz: can I _help_you?
Crazy girl: Would you like to go to church with me some time?
Liz: Not with you....
Crazy girl: blank stare
Liz: Oh im' sorry were you asking me out on a date? (in a semi interested way)
Crazy girl: OH! no! ... and skitters away.
Liz: smiles.

Bloody brillant. This among many other reasons is why I love her.

Cheers,

P

PS Liz as I have a habit of not retelling your stories exactly 100% accurately please correct any errors in the telling of this one if you happy by some miracle to be reading the blog.