One of the adventure types that I really dislike is plumbing, perhaps because I don't seem to be particularly good at it. There have been three ongoing plumbing problems at our house over the past months, and only one of them is really solved to my satisfaction.
1. Toilet not flushing consistently. I started in on this one last weekend with some hot water flushes. No dice. This weekend I did some Internet searching and fussed around more. The bowl took a bucket of water as fast as I could pour, so that told me there was no clog and the roof vent worked. That meant that the bowl was not filling fast enough when flushed. I used a wire and plumbing snake to clean out all the holes in the bowl that I could find (hint: flush with a bucket of warm water before you start, and then the water isn't so incredibly cold), and that seems to have done the trick. It flushes much faster now.
2. Bathroom sink drips. This had been drippy something like a year ago, and I put in new gaskets and springs on both hot and cold and it stopped. But it had started again. Fiddling with the spring on the cold side (it seemed stuck) seemed to pretty much solve the problem on Friday night, but on Saturday it had started dripping again. Several iterations of assembly and disassembly (including turning off just the hot water to the house, in which process I broke off the valve's handle) resulted in a faucet which dripped not a little but a lot. I ended up going to Home Depot (reasoning that the Ace parts were low-quality) and brought home two types of gaskets, including genuine Delta ones. The Delta parts didn't make much difference, but the Home Depot generic ones were pretty good. It seems to be down to a a dozen or two drips per day, which is Good Enough but unsatisfying.
3. Shower faucet drips. I first addressed this
about a month ago and ended up, after multiple trips to the hardware store, with a faucet that still dripped and also leaked from the control knob while it was one. Yesterday, after half a dozen iterations of assembly and disassembly, I ended up with new gaskets and springs and also a new ball. It doesn't leak water from the knob while it's on, but it's very stiff and still drips. I think it loses a few tablespoons a day, which isn't all that much, so I'm going to ignore the problem for the time being, but it's again unsatisfying.
The most annoying thing about this work is that there aren't shutoff valves for any of the faucets in the house, so each iteration requires two trips to the basement to turn the water on and then off again. It gets old fast. It is also frustrating to have not fully fixed the problems.
Lastly, this photo was taken with the 10-17mm fisheye. All my photos from the past month are take either with that or the 50mm manual Tak. This is because my 18-250 zoom is at Pentax being serviced and has been there for a month now. I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the choice between a fisheye wide-angle, which is kind of a trick lens and not really appropriate for general use, and an excellent but very fiddly manual lens that's not a focal length I prefer. Unsatisfying. I really hope my zoom comes back soon (I'm going to bug Pentax about it on Monday).
Project 100, #53.
One of the LEDs in Erin's headlamp had stopped working. I diagnosed that it was the LED itself that was at fault, and replaced both white LEDs with brighter ones that I took from my pile of keychain lights (leftover swag from the CSCW conference last November). Erin was very pleased.
This billboard is visible from the busway running between the St. Paul and Minneapolis campuses and targets drivers northbound on Highway 280.
The North Face hydration systems (i.e., water-filled bags with a hose that fit into a backpack, if you don't want to be so snobby) have a brilliant system where the bite valve has a magnet on it, and you clip a corresponding magnet onto your chest strap. It's super-easy to use and way better than the Camelbak clips.
This sign was posted last week in my building in an elevator and a few other places. It's one of the more egregious uses of jargon in public communications that I've seen lately. Does "loss of dial tone" mean:
First bicycle commute of the season was yesterday. It wasn't too horribly cold (over 40 F when I left the house). If I'd had my act in gear, I could have started Monday, but I didn't. Second commute of the season was today. My bum has gone soft over the winter, apparently.
It's been warm lately. I had no idea this big pile of snow was hollow. Note the discarded shovel head.
Jess has a taste for plants. Her favorite seems to be the spider plants, which make her throw up. Gross! But Erin discovered "Cat Grass", which Jess also loves and which does not make her throw up.
I find this carton of Tropicana orange juice garish and unappealing, and way too corporate. You can almost see the suits and smarmy attitudes oozing out. Shouldn't there be a picture of, oh, an orange instead of this over-Photoshopped image of a trendy glass full of orange colored liquid?
I was walking home this afternoon and came across the remains of a small bird on the sidewalk. It seemed forlorn and rather poignant, just laying there dead while the rest of the world bustled by, not noticing.
After I was done taking these photos, I put the bird in a snowbank and covered it with snow. It seemed wrong to just leave it in the middle of the sidewalk to be trodden on. I came across a dead bird on campus a few months ago in the middle of the sidewalk, and regretted not taking the time to push it to the side.
One of the adventure types that I really dislike is plumbing, perhaps because I don't seem to be particularly good at it. There have been three ongoing plumbing problems at our house over the past months, and only one of them is really solved to my satisfaction.
Shilad giving his final thesis defense on Thursday morning. (He passed.) This will be me in about a year.
This is before my evening stats class, as the room is beginning to fill up. I took the photo now rather than when the room was fuller, because this was a very peaceful time and I wanted to capture it. The instructor (a Mac grad a few years younger than me) was puttering around handing back homework, and everyone seemed very relaxed. It was an unexpected few minutes of serenity.
For my birthday, we had a "pasta-off". People brought various home-made pasta sauces (6 in all!) and we made a giant loop of home-made pasta, something like 30 feet in circumference. The above photo is cutting the wide strip into noodles.
This is taken from nearly the same angle as the Hulk Hogan's Pastamania image from 2/20 in this post. You can actually see the forlorn remains of the Pastamania awning in the junk heap in the middleground.
Messy sidewalk by the destruction. That's the Mixed Blood Theatre in the background, and also the chair in a tree.
The above is what's left of the Hulk Hogan's Pastamania building in Cedar-Riverside. I'm not surprised, given the nature of the activity that's been going on there over the past few months (and they've been vacant for quite a while before that), but it's still a bit of a shock to unexpectedly come upon buildings being destroyed.
Big machine goin' at it.
This is the building just to the south, across 5th St. It is also being torn down.
This is a chair in a tree. It's been there for a couple of weeks.
It's so you have a little reminder at your fingertips, whenever you need it. I have no idea how to install it, not having an Android myself (though that might change given this app), but that shouldn't stop you.
For some years I've had a poinsettia given to me by an ex-girlfriend (who was a girlfriend at the time). It didn't work out and for good reasons, but I like keeping the plant around because it does have sentimental value. However, it's a finicky plant and likes to drop a bunch of leaves at the slightest flaw in nurturing, so it had become extremely leggy.
Last Thursday, it snowed heavily, and lots. Here's the view out my office window.
Hulk Hogan's Pastamania, RIP. I believe that the graphics have ended up on the walls of one or more hipsters.
Last week, our garage got tagged again... third time in a couple of years. Bleah.
