Another Ring On The Trunk

Apparently Willem Dafoe and I share a birthday.

I wonder which of us is the older?

Also Rick Davies, but honestly, who remembers Supertramp?

The Swimming Pool Redux

I leaned back in my reclining armchair last weekend and said ""I don't think I will open the pool this year."'

Mrs Stevie, who had been listening for once immediately proposed a different plan, one in which I would open the pool and get ity done by July 4th, a mere four days hence.

"It would mean repairing the deck." I whined, manfully. "The whole thing is riddled with moss growths and it has huge holes in it now.¹"

Truth be told, I had been avoiding all such work for the previous year and most of this one, but Mrs Stevie made the lips of thinness and so nothing would suffice but that I decamp soonest for Home Despot where I could convert about $40 into three 12 foot lengths of pressure treated decking of meh quality² which I had cut into 4-foot boards in-store³ that I could cut with Mr Chopsaw to the exact 45-inch length needed on-site.

In the meantime I would have to pull off the cover and add more water, which would necessitate the usual Adventures in Plumbing.

I removed the leaf net from the cover and gagged at the stink of the rotted leaf mulch clinging to it, and set up the small pump to drain off the residual rainwater that had turned ominously green in the last week. It got some of it, but the pump needs depth to work well.

Removing the cover itself is always a trial as it often has a shallow depth of dirty water on it that pools as the cover is folded back, then usually manages to spill in the pool during the Herculean struggle to pull the last few feet of cover off, weighed as it is by about 5 gallons of dirty water now pooled into one place.

This year I decided to foil this inconveniant law of pool physics by leaving the small pump running while I tried to herd the water into it. This almost worked, but the pump was constantly clogging with what looked like cow manure slurry. This was composed of rotted leaves, water, guano from our fethered friends who obviously missed that old tree and dead insect juice. Eventually I got it to spill on the lawn and another bout of vomiting was induced. The water in the pool, for once, appeared clear, though there was a lot of organic detritus on the floor, dead spiders, some other insect husks and so forth.

I started to fill the pool before I removed the cover, and for once did not forget and end up flooding the garden. I dug out the pump and filter while this was going on, and attached all the hoses in fairly short order. I strapped the timer to the old bug-light pole I use for that purpose using zip ties and fired up the motor.

Which was seized solid.

In a rage born of the desire not to spend money on a new pump and effort trying to de-install the old one I grabbed the armature with my pliers and rotated it and subjected it to a barrage of some class one Words of Power until the bloody thing would turn freely. Then I turned it on again and Hey Pesto! Water circulation was happening.

Until the pump drank all the water in the skimmer and injested a lot of air. Obviously the pool needed more water, so I reconnected the water hose and went inside for a rest. When I came out again after an hour or so, the pool had overflowed, flooding the garden.

At least the pump now worked, so I could add the diatomacious earth so the filter could build itself. I was about to do that when I remembered that the filter needed a substrate on which to do that, and the cartidge was still in the shed. So I fixed that issue and was proudly watching the white soot of filtration suck through the pump when I realized I had not bled the air out of the filter cannister so nothing was happening.

I did the bonehead dance and twisted the bleed tap, and was soon rewarded with a slight drenching with pressurized cold water. Job done.

Or not. There was air leaking into the system. It took a while but I tracked it down to the seal on the lid of the leaf-extruder collander thingy. Damn! But wait! I bought two of these when the last one failed⁴ and it was hanging in a plastic bag from a rafter in the basement where it had been for Lo! these many years.

Or not. The bag was not there. I stomped over to my bench uttering some paint-blistering class fours, looked to my right and saw a plastic bag that had been hastily moved to allow access for either a plumber or phone engineer. In that bag was the lid! Oh happy day! My luck was obviously turning!

I'm not a fool. I did a thorough survey of the basement in order to spot any fires and sniffed deeply to identify any gas leaks that the anti-handyman demons had provoked so that entropy balancing would cough up the lid lest reality fracture, but there were no indications of a problem elsewhere to balance this amazing good luck.

In a trice⁵ I had replaced the lid and fired up the pump and begun the bucket chemistry needed to make the water acceptable for Mrs Stevie to float on aboard her inflatable bed. That done, I humped Mr Chopsaw out of the basement and put it in the kitchen to lessen the load tomorrow.

It nearlty killed me. Climbing the stairs I threw out my right knee, and the myserious shortness of breath nonsense I've had off and on now since COVID⁶ had me limping all over the kitchen wheezing like a busted pair of blacksmiths bellows, stifling my piteous moans manfully until Mrs Stevie yelled "SHUTTUP THAT BLASTED NOISE!" to raise my spirits.

It was too hot that day to do much more, so the boards stayed in the Steviemobile's trunk until mid-morning, when I stacked them against the house under the back porch to sweat out some of the water Home Despot treats them with.

The next day I got cracking and unscrewed the old boards and began lifting them out, anticipating about half a day of work, but the anti-handyman demons were waiting in ambush.

Once one board was up it was obvious that the joists had also rotted about a third of the way through and would not be safe to use even if they would take deck screws, which I seriously doubted. So another trip to Home Despot was undertaken and more money was converted into two straight-ish eight foot long two by fours that the nice man with the radial arm saw cut into four foot lengths for me.

Attempts to unscrew the old joists fell foul of years of rusting of screw heads, so it was back down the basement stairs to retrieve Mr Tigersaw⁷ and a few minutes after that I could climb under the deck frame, badly distorted from being tilted by the roots of the aforementioned tree, but still viable⁹.

For once, mounting new joists in the old places took only a modicum of class two Words of Power, hardly anything to write home about. Used up an evening's construction time though and I twisted my left ankle in the stuff hidden by ivy overgrowth under the deck.

I tossed some shock into the pool and left the filter running overnight and went to bed. The next morning the blasted motor was seized solid again and I realized the timer was an old, busted one that did not time.¹⁰ The blasted motor had run all night and overheated. I turned the motor off and let it cool.

I used Mr Chopsaw to cut the decking to length and Mr Tablesaw¹¹ to do some ripping-to-width for a couple of pieces that were of awkward size. A few screws and the job was done. Almost.

In order to satisfy the need to indicate the pool is not for public use and thereby avoid "attractive menace" lawsuits, and to get Diver Dan¹² to clean the pool without seeking out the ladder for hugs every five minutes, the apron of the original deck was hinged so the ladder could bw swung up our of the water, and I had to re-engineer that part as the original, upon inspection, was too far gone.

This required yet another trip to Home Despot where it proved impossible to find the one two by four by eight I would need among the collection of soaking wet, twisted knots they had pretending to be two by four by eights, so I relocated to Blowes where I found what I needed in a rack at arms length above my head, along with the "brass" hinges to replace the old "brass" hinges that had shed their faux brass finish and rusted solid.

As I was about to commence work, the air was pierced by the mechanical screech of Moving Parts About To Be Not Moving Anymore. "Cripes!" I yelled, as water began leaking everywhere. "The pump bearings have failed! This won't be cheap!"

And it wasn't. The Pool Place sold me a new pump and some fittings for a couple of hundred dollars and I was now presented with yet another two jobs: The removal of the old motor and pump, secured by well-rusted bolts, and the installation of the new one. I decided to finish the deck first.

It was a relatively painless process to assemble the apron parts, drill out the holes for the ladder poles using a holesaw I last used probably for that same job, what, 18 years ago, but I had to re-visit The Pool Place to turn more dollars into the plastic flanges that make the ladder look like it is properly installed¹³ because I could not find the spare set I had bought years before.

I was, of course home again before I realized said flanges did not come with the stainless steel screws needed to mount them to the deck, so it was off to Home Despot again to get them.

This time, due to sunburn, dehydration and general lack of the will to live, I made the grave mistake of letting Mrs Stevie accompany me, and so it was that a 20 minute trip to obtain screws became a 45 minute trip to obtain screws, a razorblade scraper¹⁴ and two bottles of glass cooker-top cleaner products¹⁵.

And soon enough the apron was installed, the ladder too and I could concentrate on replacing the pump and motor.

Getting the old motor off involved using my socket set¹⁶ to twist off one bolt, but it wouldn't grip the others so my new Dremel was deployed and demonstrated a faliure mode I've never seen before.

I used the new "quick fit" cutting disc/mandrel arrangement which has been spectaculalry successful in all the other jobs I've used them for, but this time so much heat built up while cutting I had two discs fail when the center drive boss parted company with the disc. I've never seen this happen before¹⁷, but it happened twice that day, forcing me to deploy Mr Tiger Saw to saw off the last two bolts.

Then, of course, I couldn't find any suitable bolts in the Basement Of Everything But The One Thing You Need so it was back to Home Despot to buy some. By the early evening I had the new pump installed, but it had an air leak I still have not cured. I did, however, find the new, working timer. So there's that.

The one remaining job was to install the horizontal stabilizer bars on the ladder, which requires getting into the pool, which was freezing cold. As I finished up, fireworks began exploding around the neighbourhood and I realized that it was July 4th.

Technically I had made the deadline.

1. The moss appeared first during COVID lockdown. I was puzzled because I had had the tree that used to shade the deck cut down for a variety of reasons, and suspected the moss was a by-product of bird activity which was now not so pool-proximate. I had no idea bbefore this that moss was corrosive to wood, but it is.↑
2. Home Despot has really lousy PT wood these days, twisted, full of knots and wringing wet, making getting some acceptable wood that people will want to look at and walk on without the fear of imminent plunging into the stuff under the deck a struggle and a royal pain in the arse.↑
3. they have a radial arm saw but won't let customers use it, dammit.↑
4. As told here.↑
5. Defined as about half an hour.↑
6. which has resisted cardiologists' and pulmonary specialists' efforts to find a cause for despite many tests.↑
7. A hand-held reciprocating saw that can be used any time finesse can be eschewed for maximum Nagasaki⁸ ↑
8. Damage so severe it cannot be undone.↑
9. I keep fantasizing about jacking up the other side of the deck with m' trusty trolley jack and repacking the underfill, but I'm getting old and all my joints hurt when I look at the job properly in the cold light of day. It would be an awesome urban engineering project, though.↑
10. Why I kept it when I replaced it is a mystery I can only put down to more perfidy by Mr Brain.↑
11. who lives in the basement. I had twisted up my left ankle while removing the old joists and now had no working lower limbs, making the staircase a bit of a challenge.↑
12. an automatic pool liner vacuum that wanders around the pool "randomly".↑
13. How little the bathers know me or my methods.↑
14. Which Mrs Stevie described as a straight razor, giving me a few nervous moments before I decoded her mad vocabulary.↑
15. New cooker, story to come if I feel like it↑
16. Stored in the basement, leg agony involved in moving it up the stairs↑
17. Usually the quick fit discs fail by shattering↑

Back in the High Life Again?

So, life has been bloody for a while, but let's see if I have the stamina to start updating this blog again.

Who knows? I might manage more than one post in two years this time.

It Is May; Time For My Hospital Visit

So it had been over a year, things were looking not bad financially and I was feeling healthy; it was time to get that second Carpal Tunnel surgery.

There was a small wrinkle in that Mr Brain had forgotten to remind me to renew the program I was in that stashes pre-tax pay for medical bills, so 2022's taxes will be higher and out of pocket expenses will be higher. Stupid brain.

So I went to see Doc Snipsnip who did that thing he does of making eye contact until one is sure one is hypotonuzed who booked a date on his calendar and we were set.

Another problem was that my wedding ring seems to have shrunk over the 35 years of sheer hell it signifies and was impossible to get off despite several nurses (I'm coming to that) who swore by "the hand lotion trick" or "the dental floss trick".

Now as you, dear reader, may know, surgeons really hate to start work with a person wearing jewelry. They like to say it's because certain sensors can pass electricity through the jewely and deliver a nasty burn, but the only thing that seems likely to do that to me is the "sensors" that deliver umtytump volts across the heart when the said surgeons have royally screwed something up (I'm coming to that) and are yelling "CLEAR" at everyone. Another reason is that the hands can swell up when the anethetist inserts various chemicals into one and tight rings might cause an emergency fingerectomy.

So, much to the annoyance of Mrs Stevie, I went looking for a jeweler who could cut the ring off with the sorta-promise they could make it good again *and* resize it to my manly finger. I felt that that was unnecesary, but Mrs Stevie was firm on the matter so that was that.

I was called for the pre-surgical consult at St Catherine's Hospital as I was the last time, and so Friday the 13th found me tootling up to Smithtown for this Q&A and a gift bag full of Surgical Soap, Filthy Englishmen For The Scrubbing Of.

A lucky happenstance, as it turned out.

During the quiz about what new medical humiliations had been visited upon the Steviebod in the intervening year-anna-bit, my vision started to do the thing it did last summer when I passed out. Basically, this involves the backdrop getting brighter until all foreground detail¹ gets consumed in the Nova Mr Brain has decided I should look at instead. I alerted the mediacl interviewer by asking if I might lie down as I was feeling a little faint.

She hustled me to the recliner every doctor's office has and, after applying various medical machines to me called for an emergency team to take me to the E.R. I protested that that was not really necesary and that I was sure I was going to be alright in just a few minutes² but the team arrived and would not be gainsaid, even when their gurney would not fit through the door and they were reduced to asking me if I would mind walking from the medical recliner to the Wheeled Bed of Transportation to the Seventh Ring of Hell⁴.

And so I spent the next ten hours or so in the most uncomfortable bed I have ever had the misfortune to attempt rest upon, sans pillow because there were so many other patients they had run out of them. I ended up rolling up my Levi jacket and using that because I sleep on my side and that was the only way to get the needed head support.

Mrs Stevie came for a look to check I wasn't faking, shirking or lead-swinging. But it being Friday the 13th, there were more than the usual hideous piles of post-car-accident human remains and "code blue" alarms when people would decide they couldn't take the E.R. any more and would opt to leave this plane of existence, so she fled in short order. Well, as I said, the beds were very uncomfortable⁵.

Periodically, someone would appear to take blood pressurees, blood, do ultrasound on my heart, do an EKG[Just so they could ensure I wasn't dead by the screams when they tore off the stickers and my chest and leg hair too

and toward the evening I was told that in addition to the usual Q&A, the carpal tunnel interview would now have an added "sign-off by my cardiologist".

I have no idea why American doctors always assume one has retained a staff of specialists and has them on speed-dial. Go to a GP and be told you need to see "your" dermatologist, caridologist or osteopath, then watch them recoil in surprise when you say "haven't got one of those".

I did a bit of uncharacteristic dickering and persuaded the staff to have one of their cardiologists, the one who had already visited me to supervise various nurse-goings-on stick a stehoscope on me and mutter about "heart murmurs", to do the said sign-off as I was at that time under the happy illusion that this symphony of suck was over, when in fact this was just the overture. The cardiologist hove into view around 8pm and made me sit up, stand up, lie down and do it all over again to see if I would faint. I did not so he signed me off for the Carpal Tunnel surgery.

Another doctor then told me they were going to admit me overnight for observation, so I had to hang around until about 10pm, when I was wheeled up to a ward and tranfered to a more comfy bed.

Unfortunately, the only available bed was in a room with three patients who required observation on account of them being "special needs". One of these young men wanted to go home very badly and was telling the world about it almost continually. I felt sorry for him, but I also felt sorry for me on account of my back hurt and I would dearly have loved to get some sleep.

6am rolled around and I was wheeled out of that room into a quieter one where I was able to sleep for about ten minutes until the nurses needed blood and a new cardiologist wanted EKGs and all the other things people want while one is desperate for sleep in a hospital.

Mrs Stevie hove into theater to find out why I was still there.

Which was when I realised I needed to go to the toilet very badly.

The nurses had left a portable commode by the bed but had instructed me that I was to call for a bed pan rather than use it. In light of later events this can only be seen as some sort of medical snare for the hospital virgin.

Having never been put in the position of asking a young woman to help me onto a bed pan and then to do whatever was needed affter I was done, the humiliation factor in doing so was extremely high and I elected to use the trap commode.

And passed out after doing so.

I woke to a crash team making a big fuss over me and a young nurse scolding me. Then someone took a look at what I had left in the commode and everyone got quietly efficient and reassuring.

Mrs Stevie was white as a sheet. A large elderly doctor (the first medical person I had seen over the age of Forty, I might add) who in what I heard as Germanic accent⁶ told me that he thought I was bleeding internally, and not to worry. He was going to move me to the ICU because he "prefered to have all his patients in the ICU". This was transparent patient-calming talk but I was so out of it I didn't care.

And so I was moved to the ICU and given a room of my very own with an even more comfortable bed, and the promise that I was going to be given a down-the-throat tube-oscopy to find the bleed, which was almost certainy in the bit where the duodenum and stomach meet, that I was going to be out for that part, and now I needed to be given blood.

This was when the nursing staff found out that I am what they medical profession refers to as "a difficult stick". This is a euphamism for my viens and arteries being protected by many layers of manly fat as an evolutionary defense against vampires, and the immediate effect is any attempt to draw blood or attach a "hep-lock" semi-permanent vein tap/port consists of nurses holding me down and stabbing me repeatedly while I help by my falsetto screaming and thrashing about in a suitably manly fashion.

In this fashion blood was taken, then a whole bag of new blood put back in.

The staff also delighted in attaching stickers to me for various machine inputs, then ripping them off c/w suitable amounts of chest and leg hair. This never got old⁷ and they were very put out when I eventually begged them (sometime around day 4) to just shave holes in the hair wherever they needed to put stickers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway.

That first evening in the ICU (Saturday), I was wheeled into an O.R. where an earnest young man said he was going to be my anesthetologist and would be doing "an awesome job" for me. Fighting words for the anti-anesthetologist demons he should have known were just waiting for the Call to Action.

I woke up with a tube down my throat and a machine making me breathe at just the wrong rhythm for comfort. I knew form shows like E.R. and Chicago Hope that this was normal for those situations where the patient had stopped breathing at some point in the previous hours, so I just lay there until someone noticed and we did the whole "Take a breath, now breathe out" thing. I was also connected to a variety of beeping machines, and my ankles were being rhythmically squeezed by another in a most disturbing fashion.

There was a whiteboard on the far wall. It said it was Monday. What happened to Sunday? And why did my throat hurt so much?

I looked around and assumed I was hallucinating that I was on the set of a TV medical drama. All the staff were between the ages of 25 and 35. The men were ruggedly handsome and had angles where normal people have cheeks. The nurses were all runway model gorgeous. Clearly Californian actors. Guessing I was hovering twixt the hell that is everyday life and the blessed oblivion of Lethe, I decided not to care about this. Indeed, part of the internal bleed problem was to be the lack of the need to care about anything, which was good as I was about to get a master class in the Escalation of Humiliation.

Well, no-one would tell me what was going on until Doc Accent arrived, beaming like Santa Clause, and he said that there had been a slight problem intubating me, that I had received a small cut in my throat and that it had had to be stitched up. After this it was felt that I should sleep for an extra day to let things heal up. Had he found he bleed? No. More procedures would be needed.

The real story of the throat fiasco only came out later. The "awesome job" guy had put the tube through my throat instead of down it, giving me a rather unusual peircing. An ENT surgeon had been called in who had said that the options were to remove the tube, let him stitch up the entry and exit wounds and then let Stabby McStabStab⁸ have another go, which seeing as everything was now swollen would be even harder, or for Dr ENT to slice the flesh in front of the tube open, freeing it, then stitch up the resulting slit. Since that would be the most painful, everyone voted for that. I was asleep, so they felt it was reasonable that I did not get a vote or a chance to bolt.

And so, on account of the new wound in my throat bleeding a bit more than it had when I was admitted, it was judged prudent to keep me in an induced coma while everyone got their stories straight. Mrs Steve was called by the Doc Accent and was told I had stopped bleeding⁹ but over the cell phone connection that provides the usual modern voice quality¹⁰ she heard "stopped breathing", and there was a subsequent freak-out when that was clarified and the insurance company had to be called to cancel the pay-out.

And they hadn't found the internal bleed. Doc Accent smiled and said I could have clear liquids and ices to eat. This was another ploy, as he would go on to deny me anything but ice chips for the next few days, but I grabbed opportunity by the opps and ate three tubs of Italian-style ice, which presented to the throat as acid-soaked razor blades. I didn't care, maddened by thirst as I was. Good news was that the new liquid intake would not require any effort from me to void on account of someone thoughtfully inserting a tube about the size of a garden hose up my urethra and into my bladder¹¹.

One bed-pan later, I was sent for a CAT scan and put on a nil-by-mouth diet. I was weak as a kitten which had been dosed agressively with chloral hydrate, and so could do little more than grunt when informed of tests in which I took little interest anyway.

I think it was about this point when my legs and upper arms became both numb and yet somehow agonizing to touch. The weight of a blanket was sheer misery, and to this day if I get poke hard in the leg (say by colliding with the corner of a table) it is agonizingly painful. This was yet another factor denying me sleep as I could not get comfortable despite the bed being about the best one I've yet slept in. My GP's theory is that I have a trapped nerve in my back, so there is another set of painful nerve tests in my future. Back to the ICU.

The next day I was given a few more bags of blood, put through the bed-pan routine again, had my oxygen nose-tube changed for an oxygen mask in an attempt to combat the shortness of breath I was experiencing, was stabbed a few more times in the interests of medical science and made to drink "banana flavored" contrast for yet another CAT scan.

This involved me drinking one bottle over the course of two hours, the next over the course of an hour and the next over the course of a half hour, at the end of which I was struggling not to show everyone what it looked like after it had been drunk. I have no idea how they make the flavoring, but I never want to see the mutant bananas used in the process.

The CAT scan showed no bleed site.

The next day was more bed pans and blood bags on account of me leaking out the stuff they had put in me and digesting it, and they stuck a tube down my nose to syphon out some of the fluid to see if it was bloody. In order to turn this already awful procedure into sheer torture, the doctor (who looked like Neil Patrick Harris) shot "hurricane spray" up each nostril, which was slightly more unpleasant that what I imagine running a nasal lavage with concentrated sulphuric acid would be and produced what I imagine were some pretty impressive shrieks for someone barely able to draw breath. I spent half an hour heaving and gagging and begging the doctors and nurses to take the tube out, and they finally did having seen nothing but mucus in the syphon. By then my diet was my other people's donated blood, my own having leaked out pretty much completely by then, and - it would seem - my own snot.

The next day was colonoscopy day, so they made me drink two bottles of Magnesium Sulphate soda under the impression that I had more to give when it came to bed-pan time. This would have been quite pleasant, a walk in the park, but for the wound in my throat, which experienced the soda as pure citric acid. Very painful indeed.

Doc Accent had had a conversation with Mrs Stevie in which he had assured her they were under no circumstances going to attempt another intubation, which produced a very diverting drama in the O.R. It was as I was being wheeled in that I was informed I was going to be anesthetized again and I wailed "not by Stabby McStabStab!", to the amusement of the attending nursing staff (all of whom were privvy to the throat fiasco of Saturday night it would seem). The Anesthetologist carefully arranged my head so it was tilted back as far as it would go, aided by his lady assistant. Then Doc Accent arrived in theater¹² and asked what was going on.

"We're preparing to intubate the patient" said Doc Ether.

"No! This is absolutely not to happen!" cried Doc Accent.

"Well you can't do an Upper Bowel Tube-Up-The Jacksyogram¹³ without intubation!" Doc Ether said, firmly, brooking no argument.

"This cannot be!" argued Doc Accent. "Do you know the position you are putting me in? Do you know what you've done to me"?

"I've done nothing to you" insisted Doc Ether, who was winning on calmness, but I was giving Doc Accent more points for emoting.

This went on for a few minutes until I asked politely if I had to be there for the argument, and whether or not some compromise might be reached that would not render the evening a complete waste of everyone's time.

And consensus was reached in that it was decided to knock me out and continue the professional frank exchange of views sans patient input.

And so I was colonoscopized, but the site of the bleed was not found.

The next day I had some more of other people's blood pumped in me. Though everyone was still smiling I noticed nervous debate on the subject of acquiring the blood needed. I have O negative type blood, which means I can give it to anyone, but I must get only O negative¹⁴, and it was apparent that I had used up all the O negative on-site.

On the up side, by now having my bottom cleaned by gorgeous young women (or muscular young men of the night staff) was no longer the humiliation it had been, but of course, my haemoglobin count was so low I pretty much couldn't have cared less had they started amputating bits anyway.

In fact, the staff and Mrs Stevie were becoming vocally concerned about my lack of interest in watching TV. I would later put it all together and realize that they were using this as a gauge of my mental wellbeing, but I was happy to just lie there looking at the patterns that occasionally lit up in the ceiling tiles due to oxygen starvation. I could watch TV any time (or possibly never again) but I didn't care either way.

I think it was about the time they hooked up the sixth pint of blood that I asked the young nurse tasked with watching me all day if it was time to have a difficult conversation with Mrs Stevie. They were pumping blood into me and I was leaking it out from somewhere in my digestive system as fast as they did so but they couldn't find out where, so it didn't take a genius to figure out that at some point the whole thing would become unviable.

The nurse smiled and said not to worry, but I noticed an increase of activity around me that night. Maybe they thought I was going to help matters along. I might have done so if only I could have mustered the interest in anything at all. It was all academic in Mr Brain thanks to the haemoglobin/oxygen thing. I knew some people would be upset, others less so, but from my perspective I wouldn't know much about it. Just like going to sleep.

And sleep would be a really good thing, because not only was there a steady program of wakings for blood samples and x rays and ultrasounds and stethoscope listenings (and of course the painful leg and arm thing), but my throat was swollen to the point that as soon as I drifted off I woke myself with truly staggeringly loud snoring. I can't sleep on my back anyway, even when I'm not hooked up to a nest of machines. I went days with very little sleep at all, which contributed to the lassitude I was experiencing.

Time for fresh humiliation. It was decided to put me under a "Gamma Camera".

This involved taking out some of my blood, parking me in a corridor while they irradiated it, then putting it back in me and arranging me under a large machine for 45 minutes during which time I was sternly instructed by another beautiful, young female technician not to move.

45 Minutes later, she re-appeared, giggling nervously.

"I don't know how to say this so I'll just say what Doc Radiation said. He needs to differentiate your penis from your bowel so he'd like you to elevate it"

I considered the likelihood that I was going to have the site of my bowel bleed found by a machine that could not distinguish my appendix from my appendage, and responded "In the interests of medical clarity, how far would Doc Radiation like me to raise the said member, bearing in mind that it has been a rather difficult week for me?"

The technician fled in gales of hysterical laughter and I was left attempting to achieve the requested adjustment. It should go without saying that the results were once again inconclusive.

Eventually, after ten pints of blood and nine days in bed it was felt that I was well enough to undergo another scanning. First though, Doc Accent decided I should drink something called "golightly", yet another laxative.

At this point I had had nothing but blood to eat for 9 days, so the benefit of all the laxatives was, I though then and still do, dubious at best. But there was an escalating pattern of disgustingness to all the revolting stuff I had to consume for tests (notwithstanding the out-of-band Hurricane Spray/Nasal Intubation torture which by rights should have been done more toward the end of the week) and this golightly stuff was absolutely disgusting. Not only did it have to be drunk in pint lots, it tasted rather like what I think the contents of a shark's bladder would. The point at which I was told I would have to drink three more jugs of it was the point where I mutinied and refused point blank.

The night nurse was understanding and allowed that there wasn't time for the rest of the drink schedule anyway as the scanner was available now and wouldn't be later so whatever it was was done on only one jug of shark pee.

This was when Doc Accent decided I was well enough to walk with a walker (I wasn't, but I was going to have to try), my garden hose was pulled out and one of his young staff gave me a camera to eat.

Eight hours later the sensor belt was taken off and the pictures analysed, whereupon it was found that the battery had gone flat before the trip through my entire digestive tract was over.

And the pictures they got had not shown the site of the bleed, which had seemed to have stopped all by itself.

So, since I had gotten better despite medical forensics, they moved me back into the regular hospital ward, where I spent my waking hours walking round the corridors with a walker trying to regain my strength, until Mrs Stevie arrived one afternoon to take me home.

I had been in hospital 9 1/2 days.

1. Human beings, speeding cars, charging rabid animals etc↑
2. Bringing my not inconsideralbe medical self-diagnosis powers to the fore³ ↑
3. A sad mistake↑
4. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in an E.R. knows this appelation is not hyperbole↑
5. I have come to the conclusion that this is a deliberate choice by the hospital adminsitration as a litmus test against those just looking for a good snooze and some quality time listening to their next-bed-neighbor's soap opera-like revelations to doctors and relatives through the "privacy" curtains↑
6. The Doctor was Israeli↑
7. For them↑
8. Not his real name but one I used for him in an unguarded moment as the next bout of unconsciousness loomed large in my future, to the amusement of the staff present.↑
9. from the throat; my insides were still bleeding quite nicely thank you very much↑
10. Somewhat less clear than that received from Neil Armstrong from the Sea of Tranquility in 1969↑
11. I would periodically forget this and get tangled up, giving it a good tug with a spasming leg. The long days just flew by↑
12. In Operating Theater in fact. Ahahahahaha↑
13. Not the real procedure name, I forget what the real name was↑
14. In point of fact I can't give my blood to anyone no matter how often I offer on account of being in the UK for two weeks in 1987 and therefore assumed to be a breeding ground for BSE prions. I digress↑

April, Come She Will (Despite Our Wishes To The Contrary)

April is the traditional month of get your freaking taxes done already.

While we were in lockdown some politicians had got together and sold the central post office building on 8th Avenue so Penn Station could be extended into it, thus ruining the only upside to Tax Day; watching the crowds of people sitting on the steps at 8:30pm scribbling out their 1040s for all they were worth, trying to get it done before the post office closed its multi-banked revolving doors at 9pm. Seeing people sitting around waiting for Bloody Long Island Railroad trains is no special treat, it being such a common occurence.

Turbotax told me I owed money to NY State. I double and triple checked, but ever since the tax code changes made by that nice President Trump I've been having to pay NY State instead of getting a refund, like I did for the previous gosh-knows how many years.

Brief explanation time: My place of work's payroll department has proved incapable of properly withholding from my paycheck while simultaneously deploying a cadre of personnel who refuse to believe they could possibly make any sort of mistake, hanging up the phone if one should suggest the idea merely because the Internal Revenue send one threatening letters out of the blue in spite of the fact that one is a married man with a kid, claiming to be single with no dependents¹. To offset the arrival of hate mail from the IRS I have, for well over a decade, instructed the payroll department to overwithhold from my pay to a usurious degree.

This, which should be a simply paper W4 form stating "please withhold an extra XXX dollars per month etc", is a stupidly hard automated form mandated by HRA that forces one to work out a bi-weekly version of the necessary amount based on net wages, then pro-rate for wherever we are in the fiscal year and AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!

Each year I would normaly receive a quite large refund from the Feds, a not-small one from NY State, and a reasonable one from NYC, paying me back the amount I had carefully calculated was really needed to ensure no-one would start talking about paying quarterly estimated taxes again, then doubled.

This year I got a smaller, but still large, refund from the Feds², a demand for a few hundred dollars from NY State (with menaces) and a refund from NYC that all-but matched the demand from NY State.

Given that the NYC tax withholdings are mediated through NY State, one wonders why the "arrears" in column one caused so much angst to the tax assessor part of Turbotax when it was clear they already had monies to which they thought they were entitled labelled "collected by NYC".

So with a contemptuous sneer at the suggestion to file "vouchers" and quarterly taxes - the IRS have my money, all they are entitled to within a few dollars more or less, it's not my job to watch which shoebox they keep it in - I e-filed and made tea.

1. The usual way of making the sums work↑
2. Who somehow never get round to thanking me for the interest-free loan . I digress↑

Ill Met In March

March was here!

The house was full of spackle dust but we had heat that worked, new baseboards that looked nice in the front room¹ and money in the bank for a new roof, if we could but track down a roofer.

What to do of a Saturday evening? Why, to drive over to Smithtown and eat a very late lunch at a small crepe restaurant.

And the crepes were indeed lovely, as were the hazelnut lattés.

I was feeling good as we drove home. We turned onto our street, and tootled down it at a sedate 30 mph² with Joni Mitchell bleating about Ladies of the Canyon and street musicians. All was well with the world.

Which was when Mrs Stevie let out a shreik and I looks over to see the front of a large SUV about an inch from the passenger side door coming over for a hug.

There commenced the lamest T-bone crash in history. I was doing 30. The SUV was doing whatever it was doing, not super speed at any rate. Had we been speeding we'd have bounced off each other, but as it was the SUV hit my car's front wheel, then gouged a nice path down the entire side of the car ending up with a nice ding in the rear wheel³.

We stopped to exchange information and that is when we discovered that the driver was a minor, and his passenger was just 18. The driver, I should add, was mortified and couldn't stop apologizing.

Both Mrs Stevie and I were concerned. Not only were these two lads very young, but they were Hispanic and we weren't, which could result in some unfortunate misunderstandings of the sort that had characterized that nice President Trump's tenure if we weren't very careful to avoid them.

First order of business was to ask if everyone was OK, did we need an ambulance and so forth. Then I called 911 and asked for a police officer to come and take down the details as the damage to my car looked both extensive and expensive. Then we made sure that the young driver not only provided his details, but got ours too. We insisted he photograph both vehicles as we were doing. No one had died and there was no need to have the whole thing spiral out of control. We were once young ourselves after all. I can't speak for Mrs Stevie but I was flashing back to a rear-ender I perpetrated on the South Circular Road back before electricity.

We wanted to call a parent, but the lads were adamant that there was no need. Mrs Stevie said the boys were aware that when the driver's mother found out about her car, she would revoke all driving privileges, and they were just starting their Saturday night out. I sympathized.

The police officer came and given the youth and demographic background of the young lads we stuck close to ensure that things stayed as pleasant as they could be. The officer was terse at first, and I'm sure that being on duty on a Saturday night was part of that, but he cheered up immensely when he heard a call on the radio for all officers not currently busy to go to the scene of a bad accident.

"They'll be scraping up bodies off the road for that one" he said, and cracked a smile as he turned to get our addresses. He was excused the grim scene on account of the prior accident, you see.

He was also keen to call a parent, but didn't force the issue once he ascertained that we had tried to get that too, and the young driver was not being coerced in any way. The passenger meant that any legalities involved were all properly sorted by the presence of a 'responsible adult'. It was clear none of us had been drinking, so the officer really only had to fill out his report.

Which was how I ended up driving a loaner car for two weeks while the Steviemobile II was in dock getting new wheels, new doors and cripes-knows what else⁴.

It wasn't all bad. The other guy's insurance paid for all the damages, and the loaner, while being a smaller car, had adaptive cruise and self-steer.

The former was great. Set the cruise for 50 mph in town and it would follow the traffic ahead ot the best distance and speed.

The latter was a royal pain that took me several hours to figure out and turn off. The wheel was fighting my road position habits. To check that it wasn't just my crappy driving habits I found a deserted stretch of curvy highway and let the thing steer itself. Two near excursions into the woods at the roadside persuaded me that the technology needed work.

I was getting quite intrigued by the long strip of metal that the builders had simply dropped inside the baseboard they had replaced⁵ and after a lengthy search online and a dig through the trash pile left from the construction I found that the loose bit was a damper that was supposed to be clipped to an odd-looking lug on the cover-support thingies.

I fished it out with some trouble, figured out how it was supposed to work and, with only the help of some Class Two Words of Power got it attached where it was supposed to go. Result. The cover however was missing a splice plate⁶. It took almost the entire month to track down the only supplier of that part - the same bloke who had sold me the Aquastat Relay⁷.

I tried mightly to source one somewhere - anywhere - else but it was no-go, so I made another trip to the store, where the experience was significantly different. Not only did he have the part, he gave it to me gratis, which was nice of him.

I fitted it, and was only moderately annoyed when, two days later, I found the missing part on a high shelf where the builder had left it.

Still, March was nearly done, and it would soon be nice weather. Time to get the roof sorted out.

1. But had a puzzling loose rattley strip of metal inside them↑
2. the actual speed limit thereabouts↑
3. It reminded me of the scene in Galaxy Quest where the ship scrapes slowly down the side of the spacedock while everyone cringes↑
4. I no longer care to ask↑
5. And nice it is too↑
6. used to join two short cover plates into one long one↑
7. dammit↑

More Fun With the Furnace

To be honest I simply couldn't face posting any more about the avalance of complete and utter suck that descended on me after the Great Lack Of Heat Pipe Fiasco, what with the slings and arrows being at a level not seen since the French decided to show the English a thing or two in the line of getting a good kicking at Agincourt.

But I have rallied and recovered¹.

When last I enthralled you my dear webspider² I stated that I was in need of a discontinued Aquastat Relay to make this never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Slant Fin furnace start working again instead of periodically going on strike for whatever it thought it could get out of management.

Well, I finally tracked down said part, bought it³ and called John the Plumber, who came over that evening and made a solid attempt to fit it.

It would not work.

John said I should return the Aquastat Relay to the local plumbing supply place where I got it, and since he was at the end of his tether⁴ that I should contact a not-so local appliance service center and explain the problem.

Turns out I had two problems.

The first problem was the need to fund the service center technician with close to a thousand bux before he'd do the necessary. Easily fixed with yet anothert dip into Stevie's Bottomless Money Bucket, though the tech complained the entire time about the amount of howling, wailing and gnashing of teeth he had to put up with while effecting repairs.

But finally the job was done and the furnace, having had every part not actually cast into its superstructure replaced, decided that any more mutinous behavoir might be rewarded with a trip to the dump after a cosmetic thumping with my sledgehammer and fired up for the several hours it took to get everything toasty warm again.

The second problem was that the local plumbing stuff supply guy refused to refund my money for the non-working Aquastat Relay. It would have to go back to Honeywell, he said. It would have to be tested, he said. Only then would he refund the money I'd laid out, he said.

It was clear from the way he poked his face into the works and started furiously sniffing for all he was worth that he thought I'd tried to fit the bloody thing myself and had shorted the electronics and fried them.

John the Plumber called to see if the service center had fixed things. I told him about the plumbing supply place issue and he got very cross. Turns out he knows the guy who owns the place, so he offered to go down and explain the facts. Which he did and I got a call to say the refund was waiting for me and thank you very much John the Plumber.

The builders meanwhile had decided that they would not tear out all he sheetrock in the hallway, but would put a skim coat of spackle on it, smooth it and paint.

These guys were in love with spackle. If it had been a bit warmer we could have done the job properly and had huge fans exhausing through the windows. As it was we had to make do with propping the front door open while they worked, with the end result that the entire house was coated with spackle dust. I'm still cleaning it up.

They did an OK job, but missed a few spots, but I was so heartily sick of the process by then that I gave them a check and moved them out of the way so I could work it myself. The bannister was also put back slightly off-slope. It annoys the piss out of me but not enough to pull it off and redo it. Yet.

The electrician did some extra work for me, wiring for the new ceiling fan in the front bedroom⁵ and a new hall light that Mrs Stevie declared great, and eventually I was able to buy and install a fan.

Which was whan I discovered that the switched socket was now permanently switched off.

The other electrician came round and fixed it in a jiffy, but while he was working Mrs Stevie noticed his van door was ajar and helpfully slammed it shut.

A sad mistake. Turned out the door handles on all the doors were broken off, so it was vital that the doors not be closed unless someone was inside the vehicle.

Fortunately, several of the windows were missing too, so the electrician, still smiling bravely theough his own personal sucky Sunday, ripped off the taped plastic standing in for safety glass and climbed in. I was expecting a police officer to hove into view and misunderstand the nature of the crisis, but for some reason the anti-handiman demons turned off the Farce faucet.

All that remained now was to get some furniture, remove an old air conditioner from the wall, put in a new one, repair the bits the builders had left unrepaired and I could look forward to a cool, happy summer.

February had brought high winds that ripped yet more shingles off the roof, reminding me that we had not heard a dicky-bird from the roof guy who had been so enthusiastic about pulling off the roof in mid-December.

It was time to do some shopping around.

1. Mostly↑
2. Both real readers of this blog switched to watching cat videos on ticktock yonks ago↑
3. 260 bux neatly siphoned from Stevie's Bottomless Money Bucket↑
4. I don't blame him one bit by the way; in his place I would have told me to mount my velocipede and start pedalling - he had gone above and beyond and only been reimbursed for some of his time.↑
5. Scene of indoor waterfalls, collapsing sheetrock, innundation etc.↑

Less Than A Month Down, And 2022 Starts The Suckage

So I already mentioned the disappearance of my case review date with immigration, but that really counts as 2021 putting in a final boot before sneaking off into the winter night and not an indcation that 2022 is getting the bit between its teeth.

Stay tuned.

Mrs Stevie and I departed for Florida on the third Friday in January, ready to take up residence in our timeshare week starting the fourth Saturday in January per the agreement we've held freehold for lo! these many years. We've done this for many years, and now have it all down to a fine art: We load the Mrs Steviemobile with four or five boxes of essentials (paints, easels, my n-scale UK model railway gear, clothing, Harry Potter cosplay gear etc) load a cooler with sandwiches and bottled water¹ and the iPad with a Terry Pratchett book-onna-tape³ and off we go.

This year the cargo included three big totes of stuff for the Stevieling, whose stuff is currently taking up one room, half a basement and a storage unit in NY. I keep hinting that maybe a storage unit in Florida would be a better idea⁴ but so far no action has been taken.

We break the journey just this side of the North/South Carolina border, which on a good day means we arrive at a hotel around 7pm and at the timeshare around 4pm the next day. Last year we hit bad weather and it took longer. The year before we had a winter storm so we started a day early and broke the journey in three. Bad weather is very bad in the South because they don't know how it works⁵.

This year we drove out of cold weather in NY into a winter storm in Virginia and North Carolina, something that was once unknown and is now getting to be a familiar exerience⁶. We still made decent time, but the driving was terse because Virginian drivers don't do weather well and in North Carolina they were not used to plowing so the plows and graders they were using were going slow and carving up the road. The sparks were pretty. Funny thing, I only knew it was snowing because of the noise. With the headlights dipped I couldn't see anything but the road. On full beam sleeting snow. If I hadn't heard the exact same hing two years before I wouldn't have understood the danger before we hit the black ice. We stopped just shy of the North/South Carolina border and it was cold.

Saturday we got up early and driving was pretty nice at first as everyone in the Carolinas decided that the weather was so cold they would stay at home in case the weather did something nasty. It didn't last for very long, but was neat while it lasted.

We rode into the timeshare complex around 5pm and Mrs Stevie went to check in. I don't deal well with the check-in drones' attempts to upsell us and Mrs Stevie's attempts to get free stuff without going on a four hour kidnapping tour and sales-pitch, so I sit in the bus and fulminate while she deals wth it all.

She returned remarkably quickly, smiling hard⁷. It turned out that for some alchemical reason I am still unclear on, the timeshare conglomerate had decided that because the first Saturday of the year was on Jan 1st, it didn't count and therefore we were a week early⁸. "Lots of people are making that same mistake" a smiling employee told Mrs Stevie. Mrs Stevie pointed out that perhaps some sort of warning that this bizarre calendaring had been decided upon could have been sent to owners and thereby the issue could have been avoided. The timeshare people decided they could pretend it was our week even if we differed on how many Saturdays had elapsed in 2022. Our unit was in use, but they found us another on the same block, so it was all OK. Ish.

The weather during our stay proceeded to be foul. Cold and wet. Think English autumn. Scratch that. Think Welsh autumn. In mountain country.

We had decided that we had nothing to do but spend time with the Stevieling and her hubby on this visit, but they had an unusually busy social schedule so we only saw them for a couple of days.

So we made the best of things by bickering and arguing, as couples do, until it was time to leave for NY again.

The drive back on Saturday⁹ was not bad, we were a long way from the blizzard ravaging NY that day, but we made a very early start on Sunday so as to avoid the section of I95 in Virginia where everyone forgets how to drive¹⁰. About the time we got to that section Mrs Stevie had the idea that the driveway would be blocked by the 18 inches of drifted snow a neighbor was reporting, so she called a plowing service and got our driveway cleared. Sorted. Everything was looking good.

Of course, it was too good to last.

On entering the house I detected that it was in fact colder inside than it was outside, and it was below freezing outside. Yes, that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Slant Fin furnace had shut down, by the feel of things about ten minutes after we left the house bound for the balmy drizzle and cold of Florida despite having a nice new thermocouple fitted only six weeks before when it shut down until John the Plumber could get it going again.

Mrs Stevie sprang into action as I struggled fruitlessly to light the pilot. She called John the Plumber. He, bless him, loped over and got the furnace started, but it shut down about 45 minutes later. John opined it needed a new gas valve and politely asked if he could come back the next day. There being no option, it being night on a post-blizzard Sunday with the likelihood of the gas valve stockist being open standing somewhere south of nil, I agreed this was acceptable.

As I was having this conversation there was a loud crash from the kitchen followed by some light, glassy clinking. I ran into the kitchen but could see no obvious fallout. I thought it might have been the final wheel of the microwave cart giving up the ghost and collapsing like the other three have under the loads Mrs Stevie put on it¹¹, because the cart is where we store our liquor supply¹² and the bottles might make the clinking noise. No matter. Anything not on fire or leaking was by definition OK.

I deployed our only space heater and Mrs Stevie slept in an armchair with it pointed at her, she cocooned in blankets with an electric heating pad. I initially put all the rings of our cooker at full blast, and to be fair that was effective, sorta, but the thing it was most effective at was melting our hot air fryer standing next to the cooker. So that worked. I retired to the unheated front downstairs bedroom and slept fully clothed with two heating pads between the top sheet and the comforter, reasoning I slept in an unheated bedroom while a child so no big deal.

It was bloody cold. Every three hours the heating pads shut down so I could experience what it would be like to be on Scott's expedition team. I kept warm by re-activating the heating pads and moaning piteously in a manly fashion.

The next day I rose early, chipped he ice off my beard and started to make tea. On opening the cup cabinet I discovered the real reason for the crash and clinky noises. The top shelf of the cabinet, the one with a bunch of wine glasses on it, had suffered the failure of the little pin-brackets that held it in place and fallen onto the shelf below. I rejoiced in my good fortune in discovering a lateral bracket failure, the sort that drops one end of the shelf onto the content of the one below, rather than the one I found last time, a longitudinal failure of the front brackets that rigged the cabinet o' canned goods as an elaborate Laurel and Hardy-esque booby trap and cost me severely smashed feet as I unsuccessfully attempted to catch the avalanche of a year's supply of canned soup.

John turned up clutching a universal gas valve¹³ as I was finishing unloading the shelves and removing them. He went downstairs, fiddled and swore and announced thet the gas valve he had wouldn't fit¹⁴. He spent the next three hours trying to find a gas valve that would fit the Slant Fin furnace of rebellion, found one in Hicksville, bought it, brought it then fitted it and for a wonder the furnace¹⁵ burst in to life. The baseboards began to warm and I did a little dance of victory but couldn't help noticing that John was not joining in. If fact he was positively pensive. Measurably morose.

"What's up" I asked, hoping for something un-furnace-related.

"I don't feel any circulation in the upper circuit" he said, gripping a pipe gloomily. "You can feel the downstairs is working fine."

I gripped the pipe he indicated.

"See? Red hot, just like it is supposed to be. This one is just warm from conducted heat from the pipes. I think the pipes upstairs are frozen" he said, and I thought I detected a hint of plumberly predation through my watering eyes, though I was somewhat preoccupied hopping round the basement with my right hand clenched under my left armpit while gnashing my teeth so hard the enamel was flaking off them.

He opined I should use space heaters to warm the upstairs, and told me how to shut down the water should the pipes have done what pipes always do when they freeze, smiled appreciatively at my heartfelt wails at the sight of the bill, accepted a check for his servces, helped me stamp out the spontaneous fire that started in my checkbook and departed Chateau Stevie.

I also departed, bound for Blowes where I had reason to believe I might locate the extra space heaters I would need, and the brackets I needed to fix the kitchen cabinet almost getting arrested for setting off the smoke alarms at the checkout when my visa card melted. I was escorted to my car, drove home, deployed the new space heaters in the freezing upstairs bedrooms,and began work on the cabinet restoration. This involved drilling out the shorn-off pins, then drilling out the mounting holes as the pins on the new brackets were a different size than the old ones, and slowly losing the will to live.

But the fun was just beginning.

I wandered into the upstairs and noted that the space heaters had the upper rooms at 70 degrees in a remarkably short time. The "working" baseboards were only managing to raise the downstairs by a couple of degrees an hour, because the house structure was so cold. Yay, space heaters!

I wandered into the downstairs bedroom and was greeted by the sound of indoor rain. I drew the curtains and saw that most magnificent sight, the indoor (hot) waterfall all made more beautiful by the backdrop of trees through the window. Pausing only to deploy a towel and some appropriate Class Three Words of Power I ran downstairs and pulled the valve to shut off the flow of water to the upstairs heating zone. Then I ran upstairs (twice) and zeroed out the upstairs thermostat, and then back down to the bedroom to call John the Plumber.

Which was when the front downstairs bedroom ceiling fell in, dousing the carpet, bed, my everyday leather jacket¹⁶, my guitar, two autoharps and my strumstick in a mix of water, gypsum sludge, clods of orange fiberglass and clumps of the water-logged white Mammoth-hide insulation that was used when the house was built.

I opined to the air that this was in fact the most vile turn of luck one might encounter so early in the year, and to reflect on the irony in that if we had found out about the timeshare calendar debacle in time we would have been home when the furnace failed and avoided what would surely be a very inconvenient and expensive series of events-to-come, but I did so using far fewer words on account of needing to find buckets and a stick to poke holes in the ceiling so more of it wouldn't come crashing down. It was all very tiresome.

John the Plumber arrived the next day with his son¹⁷ and they proceded to replace the split section with PEX, a sort of plastic pipe that apparently can resist splitting better. I think copper has just become so expensive post 9-11¹⁸ it is no longer cost effective to use it for pipes. It also has the advantage it is attached by snap-fitting rather than soldering with heat¹⁹.

Once the repair had been made John, the other one, turned on the water just a bit so we could watch the second leak soak into the basement and ruin another wall and some hall ceiling.

John asked if there was a crawlspace access hatch. I said no, I didn't think so. We went back and forth on this for a bit, then John said he'd make a hole in the back of the Stevieling's former bedroom closet.

"No problem" I said and opened the closet to dislay the problem. Mrs Stevie had already used the closet to store clothes (because all the other closets in the house are not, apparently, enough for the Fall Collection) and every single Playmobil figure, vehicle, boat, ship, plane and playset ever made except for the castle²⁰. So it was with much cursing and red-face that I emptied it out so John (the same one) could make a new inspection hatch with his mighty sawzall.

I retired out of theater, but could hear the gentle re-assuring bursts of foul language as John crawled through the tiny space and replaced another eleven leaks.

It was finally over, and John presented his new bill, which I greeted with the proper crying, wailing, tearing of hair and howls of "Why me?" and I deployed another check drawn upon Stevie's Magic Bottomless Money Bucket, and the Two Johns departed, slapping each other on the back and trading ideas on how to spend their new-found riches.

At least the heat was working.

John the plumber had suggested a firm for the damp mitigation steps needed next, and we argued the insurance company into using them. They arrived, talked a good game and described the pulling out and putting back needed, all with many re-assurances. It was only after the hall ceiling was down that I discovered they weren't going to put anything back. That would be the job of the "construction contractor".

Another call to the insurance people garnered the sniffed news that the firm they originally wanted us to use would indeed have put it all back. So Mrs Stevie called that firm and suggested that although they had lost the original demolition work due to a "communication issue"²¹ perhaps they would like the contract to rebuild. They would, but couldn't start until an estimate was made, and the first opportunity to do that would be next week.

Since I was rapidly running out of available time off, we tearfully begged the assessor to come on the weekend and they finally agreed once the acceptable grovel-threshold had been achieved. So we are looking forward to that.

And last night, around 6pm, the furnace c/w new gas valve and thermocouple, shut down.

John the Plumber ran over, poked the furnace, got it working again and opined that the Aquastat Relay²² was failing intermittently. He suggested I find one, buy it and he'd fit if for me. A quick search and call-around to local suppliers revealed that the part was discontinued and they did not have a substitute. Mid-search the furnace shut down. I wiggled wires, banged solid-looking components hopefully, then poked the armature of the relay and it closed with a loud click like a bone dislocating and the boiler fired up.

The saga continues.

1. which we worked out saves us about two hours of transit time per leg by not stopping and buying prepared meals² ↑
2. and besides Covid, refusal to mask up in Southern States and why encourage that?↑
3. Maskerade this year↑
4. By saying "For the love of Azathoth will you please get a storage unit near you? I will pay for it!"↑
5. There's a video out there of some people in Georgia watching a minivan sliding sideways directly toward them down an ice-encrusted hill, and they only think to take evasive action when the vehicle is literally an arm's length away↑
6. Nope, no climate change here↑
7. I have learned to fear that smile↑
8. After spending far too many brain cycles milling this idiocy I believe it may be because the fourth Saturday of the month was in fact the end of the third full week ↑
9. we say the fifth in the month, they say the fourth↑
10. the same place where the blizzard stranded people for 24 hours two weeks ago↑
11. Mrs Stevie remains obstinately ignorant of the nature of gravity and weight when it comes to putting things on top of other things, and the three wheels I could actually see had surrendered to the Atlasian loads the cart had been called upon to support in defiance of its design specs↑
12. Something I was feeling more and more would be useful in the very near future↑
13. The proper part was not to be had for luvner money, apparently↑
14. Universal. Right↑
15. Now re-christened Start You BLEEPing Bastard↑
16. My genuine Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator T2 souvenir motorcycle jacket!↑
17. Also John. Does that make them John the Plumbers, Johns The Plumber or Johns the Plumbers? I have no idea↑
18. We use an awful lot of it for making ammunition↑
19. No burned hands, no impromptu fires. Where's the fun in that?↑
20. That is in the basement. I checked↑
21. Specifically the abundance of misdirection communication being done before the walls were pulled down↑
22. Not a plumber-made-up part name. I checked↑

Catching Up

Well, that was a year of suckage, wasn't it?

From discovering that we had a real, honest-to-goodness epidemic plague loose in the world, to discovering that our neighbours were and remain a bunch of idiots who would rather take massive doses of horse dewormer¹ than get an injection containing Bill Gates microchips, black helicopters and gosh knows what-all else, to the discouraging fact that the said plague was not playing fair and was infecting people who had been given the injections to the pundits on both sides of the arguments getting super stupid largely because their TV studios were half empty²

Disappointing the results of the polls, too. Almost half the people who could be arsed to get off their fat backsides and vote still thought a man incapable of stringing coherent thoughts together on any given day, a man who gave the country permission to behave like animals (providing they were on the right side of course), was still a fit choice to lead us. I fear for the continued existence of the United States.

And the barely believable events of January 6th, when the world watched the so-called largest democracy in the world host a third-world insurrection which it seems increasingly possible was actually fomented by the outgoing administration and a bunch of back-room actors who put Nixon's dirty tricks team to shame. The world watched the all-too-close call American democracy had with the Dictator's axe-crew, most of whom seem bound to escape the well-earned legal thumping the astoundingly stupid rioters are getting.

What seems strange is that the people in charge of the aftermath don't appear to grasp that the constitution-established law was well and truly broken - the Constitution often doesn't say much about the things people commonly believe it does, but has very definite and easy to understand language about how the government is chosen, and what should be done about people who attempt to subvert that process by force of arms. And yet the charges that are brought are of the "disorderly conduct" and "breaking and entering" variety, rather than traitorous insurrection. No doubt I am too naive to understand the nuances of the law involved.

Feeling completely unempowered to affect events on the larger stage, let me return to more personal matters.

The Citizenship Screw-up

I filed for US Citizenship in 2020. The date for my case to be heard was originally January 2021. On January 1st, it changed to March 2021. Then it was changed to "It's all taking a bit longer than we thought. Stand by". A small crisis was averted when my visa was extended by some very helpful immigration people, and my new date became December 2021. It is now back to "Stand By". Covid derailing the wheels of government, of course. Can't be helped, but worrying.

Working From Home

In March of 2021 I was ordered to cease and desist coming to work, and start and commence and, presumably, ensist, working from home.

Initially, I expected this to be a problem, and for my productivity to drop due to distractions, but in actual fact, and despite various "experts" on PBR⁵ opining to the contrary, I found myself working far more efficiently and productively. My attitude was great in the morning, an effect I put down to not having had to cross swords with the Bloody Long Island Rail Road before I started, I worked steadily without interruptions or distractions from people in other cubes having loud phone calls, and often would log back in after the rather stupidly configured remote software kicked me out after 8 hours⁶ so I could finish what I was doing.

Not only that, if I was required to work an extended shift to accommodate the truly herculean efforts my colleagues in the applications teams were putting out to switch NYC from a face-to-face process to a remote-by-computer one, I could do so having had a bite to eat and still feeling relaxed and keen to go because my morale had not been hammered flat by the Bloody Long Island Rail Road demonstrating that they could not get me appreciably merry in a brewery.

Of course, this had to end. "The optics are not good" one manager said. Several more opined that we were needed to help save the NYC small businesses by buying lunch from them.

I have to admit I found this rather hard. For years I've listened to these same NYC dwellers tell me how the commuter is killing NYC by working there then leaving, paying a non-resident level of tax (which in my case is an outright falsehood, I am required to pony up as though I live in NYC). Now we commuters are the last, best hope for the NYC small businessperson?

I returned to commuting to find the Bloody Long Island Rail Road still couldn't give me a good time in a cat-house.

Not only do they still cancel trains - and still make a habit of canceling the straight through Wyandanch-Brooklyn trains in preference to the umptytump Penn Station trains - now the trains they provide as an "alternative" are overcrowded superspreader parties on wheels. So lessons learned and preparation for a post-Covid world: Nil.

The New Roof Ditheration

In August I decided to put a new roof on the house and solicited bids. Only one builder showed up, but he gave me a fair price for what looked like a very good deal. Then he vanished. I called him in October and he said he was having trouble sourcing materials, which was understandable, but that he would get back to us soon. A few days after Thanksgiving he called me to say his team would be around my house on the second week of December to replace the roof.

I pointed out that the brochure he had given me spoke long on the subject of the roof being composed of a self-sealing arrangement of shingle and underlay, that the sealing process required several days of warm, sunny weather, and specifically said that unless the roof was properly sealed it wasn't covered under the warranty.

The builder agreed that this was indeed the case, and we then agreed that he should schedule the work in the spring. The week he wanted to start, there was a heat wave.

I Attempt Plumbing; The Anti-Handiman Demons Fire For Effect

Speaking of Thanksgiving, Mrs and Mrs Stevieling asked if they could come and stay and we said yes, which required us to clean out The Stevieling's room, which she had left looking like someone had backed a thrift shop into it and then blown it up. Mrs Stevie, under the impression that I proposed putting them up in that room then cooperated wonderfully, finding a storage unit for a reasonable price and packing everything up. I helped transport it, but refused to help parcel it up. actually, that is not true. I had offered to go in with a pitchfork and deal with the bloody problem but had been rebuffed.

With two weeks to go before wheels-down, Mrs Stevie announced she was going into Manhattan for a long weekend with her friends, to attend some band performances. She believes this band is really cooking. I believe that band has overcooked to the point of needing a packet of baking soda and a damp cloth to smother the flames, but of course I do not say that out loud when she plays their CDs. I limit myself to groaning, clutching my ears and crying "By All The Gods Olde And New, Please Let It Stop Soon".

Anyway.

I saw this as a good time to renovate the horrible downstairs bathroom that had never been properly improved since we moved in, and featured bright yellow el-cheapo renter-special fixtures'n'wotsits. Peace, quiet and no-one making uninformed comments about unavoidable fires breaking out or complaining about the shrieks of pain the normal deployment of a blowtorch elicit.

So no sooner had Mrs Stevie decamped, I grabbed hold of the vanity top and pulled hard and it tore off the wall, being bodged in place with eight-penny nails that were mostly rust after 30-mumble years of steamy showers⁷. I filled a few things with water in anticipation of Anti-Handiman Demon activity and turned the household water supply off⁸

This was necessary because the little stop-taps that live under the sink had fused into solid masses of brass when the Chixulub meteor smashed into the Earth. Replacing them was going to be high on the list of Stuff to Do. Then it was the work of a few minutes with Mr Tiger Saw and the vanity and sink were outside and I was ready to deploy m' plumbing skills!

The plan was to cut the old fittings off using either my trusty pipe-cutter or, failing that, my even more trusty Tiger Saw, but naturally a problem poked its spiky head out of the u-bend almost immediately. The old stop taps had been soldered into place very close to the walls, likely before the wallboard had been nailed into place. When cut, the hot water line would be flush with the wall.

Plan B immediately sprang full-formed into Mr Brain (in fact I sort of planned for this eventuality ahead of time by buying the parts needed, which was stupid because in thwarting the need to overnight sans water because the blasted shops would be shut had naturally woken up the Anti-Handiman Demons and given them time to plan villainy of the most desperate stripe). I would solder the stop tap to a short length of pipe, then use a copper sleeve to join that to the newly-cut pipe. This would mean the stop tap soldering of the heavy brass fitting would be done away from the wall, and only the relatively quick copper-copper soldering would need to be done very close to the cardboard cladding of the wallboard.

I started with the cold water line to give me a chance to get my soldering hand back in before having to deal with hiding pipes. It went well. I had the assembly all soldered up and had inflicted the obligatory agonizing hand burn by picking up the red-hot brass tap fitting in about five minutes. Then I grabbed a spritzer bottle I had pre-filled with water as a makeshift fire extinguisher¹⁰ and put out the small fires that had started on the wall and it was Job Done. Half Done, anyway.

The hot water line added the complication of having zero pipe poking out of the wall. I countered this by grabbing the pipe with vise-grips and pulling it out of the wall. Luckily the pipes had been installed "Genaro Fashion" and had no internal bracing to speak of and so there was some leeway to be had. The pipe was cut and a new fixture fabricated. Deciding to get a head start on fire suppression I spritzed the wall liberally before I began waving the roaring flame of pipe soldering all over it.

A sad mistake.

The wall absorbed much water, then gave way, and the pipe retracted, pulling the vise grips through the wall, making a rather large hole. (see picture).

Snarling some pre-prepared class three Words of Power I grabbed the pipe, reconfigured the vise grips and applied heat to the pipe. The wall gave way some more and the pipe retracted taking the vise grips with it.

It was all very tiresome.

Eventually, by holding the vise grips with my foot while I waved the flames over the pipe I was able to solder the fitting into place. Then I was able to turn on the water, add some flexible riser pipes and test the water was working properly. Of course, the first time I opened one of the stop taps I let go of the flexible pipe and so the water that was supposed to go into the coffee can (see picture) went all over me instead, but that did have the effect of extinguishing a couple of small body hair fires I had not noticed, so all was well that ended not badly, all things considered.

Then I replaced the U-Bend, which was where the Anti-Handiman Demons really got the bit between their teeth.

If you take a look at the annotated photograph you can see the old u-bend u-bending then disappearing into a compression fitting on what turned out to be a cast-iron pipe fitting connecting to the greywater drain. Water from the kitchen sink also passes through this pipe, as does the dishwasher drainage. Further downstream is where it joins the outflow from the commode which is where I'm drawing the line.

Ever since we've lived here the sinks block about every four to six months requiring a tiresome and disgusting process of filling the kitchen sink with water then using a plunger to suck the crud out of the pipe and into the bathroom sink, then allowing it to drain out again. This will be relevant soon. Back to the U-Bend.

No matter how much I swore the bloody fitting would not come loose so I could remove the old U-Bend and replace it. I ended up having to heat it with my trusty blowtorch, after which I could use Mr Pipewrench to unscrew the collar and pull out the straight pipe from the cast iron fitting along with 30 years worth of impacted crud that had backed up behind the compression fitting seal.

After a short dry-heave break I deployed the new U-Bend and compression fitting and discovered two unfortunate things:
     a) The new straight pipe was a very worrying rattling fit in the cast-iron fitting, and
     2) Home Despot had changed supplier for their compression fittings with disastrous consequences.

Old-style compression seals are triangular cross section. You slip the collar over your pipe, slip the seal over he pipe "blunt" side toward the collar, slide the pipe into the fitting seating the seal as you go until the pipe is where you need it, then screw down the collar to deform the seal and fill all the gaps. Works surprisingly well.

The new seals appear to be simple rubber washers, square in cross section, and in this case the seal would not deform and make a proper seal no matter how tight the collar was screwed down. The straight pipe was still a rattling, and therefore leaky, fit. Luckily I had a fresh old-style seal in my toolbox and some unused class threes in my vocabulary and was able to deploy both to fit the U-Bend securely. And thence to bed for some well-earned rest.

Now, I had had to cut the straight pipe to the approximate length required - that is what it is for, to allow some horizontal customization options when matching to the sink drain. But it bothered Mr Brain that I had slid so much of it into the fitting that it had to be protruding into the greywater drainpipe. I resolved to remove it again the next day and cut it shorter.

It was while doing this the next day that I recalled just how long the old straight pipe had been. It must have been pushed all the way across the greywater drainpipe as in Diagram 1. And thus a sneaking suspicion as to the cause of all those old blockages made its way into Mr Brain. Now the situation more resembled Diagram 2 the flow of water attempting to drain from the kitchen or dishwasher would be unimpeded by the bathroom sink U-Bend's straight pipe and I thought blockages might be a thing of the past as a result¹¹.

The next day I fitted the sink vanity and discovered that the U-Bend was a 1 1/2 inch pipe but that the sink drain was a 1 1/4, and moreover was a good four inches too high to connect to the U-Bend anyway, so another run to Home Despot was enacted to search for a conversion adapter, which they did not have so I made a run to Arse Hardware where they said they didn't but I found that they did, albeit as part of a kit intended for some other purpose. After that it was the work of only half an hour with Mr Hacksaw and some more class threes to connect the sink to the wastepipe, the taps to the risers and the little chrome stick to the plug release. Huzzah! A sink!

The water flow through the taps was surprisingly light and disappointing but there were no kinks or blockages and last night's drenching had proved the water pressure was good. I guess in the intervening years since I fitted that exact same design of tap to the old sink there must have been some sort of well-meaning water conservation activity at the tapworks.

I will draw a curtain over the removal of the old toilet and the installation of the new one, except to say that I managed to drop my prized Leatherman down the sodding wastepipe even though I had it blocked with paper towels. I couldn't get my hand to it as it lay on the bend, threatening to slip over and drop into Pipus Incognita, but Mrs Stevie could and retrieved it just so she could lord it over me for a few days. You'd think the pipe would have been filthy but it was sparkling clean. Even so the Leatherman was subjected to maximum hygiene soakings in various chemicals before I allowed myself the pleasure of sucking it again, as I had no idea what Mrs Stevie had been holding before she grabbed Mr Leatherman.

The toilet, bought for its profile and general looks, turned out to be a new design that intentionally only half filled its tank. The instructions bloviated about a new special power flush design that used less water (which I was less than happy about given the lackluster performance of the new taps) but for a wonder it works very well.

Mrs Stevie was briefly interested in a different model that advertised it could flush 100 golf balls, but I pointed out that the golf balls would inevitably clog the pipes and disable the septic system, and would cost a fortune to boot, and she decided that wasn't a desirable feature after all.

Installing the commode also called for another fossilized-shut-stop-tap-ectomy, and I had a slight brainwave when I decided to add a right-angle turn to the extra pipe I was adding so the stop-tap would be close to the wall but not require me to set fire to the wall to install it.

And that, for a wonder, worked well even when I wanted to install a new over-the-toilet hutch-cupboard thingy and did not end up having to saw slots in it to accommodate the piping even though I had not thought to measure it all up first. Not only that, the new commode was wider than the old one, so the stop tap would have been hidden in a multiple Class Four location vis-a-vis installing a risor pipe to the tank. As it was, only Class Twos were involved.

Thanksgiving.

The kids arrived in theater and promptly buggered off to be with their friends and others who were actually pleasant company. But the Stevieling insisted she would make thanksgiving Dinner round her grandmoher's house for the immediate family, around five people. Grandmother then invited All the extended family and a panic attack was triggered.

I came downstairs the day before Thanksgiving feeling crappy. Ever since I went back to work I've been catching one cold after another. I underwent Covid tests the first few times, all negative, but had stopped doing that because I had none of the other symptoms of fever, chills, boils, locusts and whatnot. But I had warned everyone that I was not going to put the Grandmother at risk if I got very sick. I'm getting ahead of the story.

The Stevieling was showing signs of quiet desperation, and after a few minutes of insistent interrogation by yours truly admitted that there were insurmountable problems with her doing the cooking she planned at our house. There was no room in the fridge. There was too little time to make the five pies she had planned. It was all going horribly wrong.

I strolled over to the fridge and started unloading cans of soda, huge flagons of iced tea, and bottles of "Harry Potter Butter Beer" Mrs Stevie had laid down in the late Jurassic. The Stevieling opined there was now enough room in the fridge, but not enough hours in the day.

So we decamped for the swank bakery just down the road where Daddy's Bottomless Money Bucket provided three pies that only required a bank loan to secure. Thick choking smoke filled the bakery.

"The pies are burning!" screamed the baker.

"Calm yourself! That is merely my wallet immolating itself." I replied.

Having resolved The Great Pie Disaster by hurling money at it, the Stevieling decided she would bake the two remaining pies herself, which she did.

On the day, I was very much sicker, and in the mood to just lie groaning under a blanket in peace and quiet, so I did that while everyone else decamped for Grandma's. Well, there was a small debacle when the pumpkin pie we had bought turned out to have a skin of mold over it, but the baker replaced it with no arguments. Something to do with the way the pumpkin slurry had been prepared. What do I know? I'm not a baker.

Staying home turned out to be a Good Idea though, as my quick solutions to the Stevielings' problems had of course attracted some anti-handiman demons which she, poor girl, was unprepared to deal with.

When they got to Grandma's house, now full of people, the kids made their signature Turkey Wrapped In Bacon And Painted With Butter, placing the bird in a foil baking pan.

What they didn't do was put the baking pan on a rigid baking tray before putting it in the oven and roasting it, with the result that when Mrs Stevie attempted to remove the now-brimming-with-fat baking dish it buckled and spilled "some" fat into the oven. Had anyone noticed even this wouldn't have been a problem, but then someone had the bright idea of baking crescent rolls, and the afternoon descended into fiasco.

The spilled fat ignited, filling the house with dense black smoke.

It was at this point that it was discovered that Grandma didn't have a fire extinguisher and fiasco became debacle. It was decided to evacuate the house, but only after everyone had grabbed a plate of food, which they ate in the freezing cold driveway. Mr Stevieling raced around banging on neighbors' doors pleading for a fire extinguisher, which either no-one had or no-one was willing to share. Grandma was having a meldown about her "ruined" oven, and the Stevieling was in tears over the whole affair. I imagine that after a few more of these sorts of out-of-parameter excursions she will have my own fatalistic attitude and simply run in circles gibbering.

It took so long to organize all this chaos that the fire, of course, went out, and the smoke dispersed without causing further damage, allowing a resumption of Thanksgiving in the more-traditional inside venue. Grandma was fulminating over her oven which would :have" to be replaced.

The next day I rallied the troops, grabbed some cleaning supplies and the kids and deployed them in oven-cleaning mode at Grandma's house. Grandma was now just muttering darkly, but was secretly pleased to have the Stevieling nearby again. I investigated why the smoke detector had not gone off during the Great Thanksgiving Conflagration and discovered that Grandma's habit of poking it with a broom handle when it went off during her cooking sessions had bashed and smashed the works until they were now just a do-it-yourself kit. I departed to Home Despot to throw more money at this Thanksgiving Fiasco to Make It Go Away.

Two hours later the oven was clean enough to put it into auto-clean mode without the danger of more dense black smoke, the new smoke detector was securely mounted to the ceiling ready for its first damn good poking and we left so we could get lunch before the kids had to be back at the airport.

Grandma was now fit to be tied, as the vision of a nice new oven had receded over the horizon. Not only that, she later admitted that the oven had never been so clean. Turns out she doesn't use the self-cleaning program properly.

So much for Thanksgiving.

And just before the year could wind down and die with a whimper, the Chateau Stevie Furnace o' Heating stopped, er, heating.

I suspected the bloody thermocouple had burned out, but since Mr Stevie had not had the wit to look at the thermostat while I was doing battle with the Bloody Long Island Rail Road, John the Plumber was not alerted to our situation until 7:30pm at which point he quite reasonably said he could come first thing the next day. Which he did, and he took two hours to install a themrocouple that worked and do sundry other essential maintenance stuff. In the meantime I deployed a small electric heater to keep the core of the house inhabitable, then went to bed.

The next day John the Plumber did battle with the furnace and merged victorious after only two and a half hours of man vs furnace in a World Gone Mad, and Chateau Stevie gradually warmed to tolerable levels.

1. Yesyesyes I know that Ivermectin is also used as a by-prescription-only treatment for scabies, but people aren't taking that, they are taking the over-the-counter stuff they get from the feed store↑
2. Bill Maher has been a particular disappointment for this writer, as his writers have had him spouting the most ridiculous and easily disproved stuff about what the CDC are³ saying to how natural immunity is better than that conferred by the vaccines⁴. His angst over the lack of bums on seats has had him reversing many of his positions and taking contrary viewpoints depending on who he is targeting. As a rather vocal former commentator was fond of writing at the end of his unhinged rants: Sad.↑
3. not, actually↑
4. or, if you buy into so-called medical science, not so much, really↑
5. Public Radio, a listener supported non-commercial radio↑
6. Because I was not watching the clock, not needing to make allowances for catching the one straight-through train from Brooklyn to Wyandanch. Think of how much free overtime the taxpayers of NY could have had if the software had - for example - been set to kick people off after eight hours fifteen minutes↑
7. Neither the kid nor that bloody woman open the sodding window, and the Stevieling was wont to use an entire 50 gallon tank of hot water per shower. It's a wonder she didn't dissolve or grow gills↑
8. I can do this easily because years ago, as an anti-flood-the-house-while-we-were-on-vacation measure I had installed two inline ball-valve shut off taps, one in each line. Now I simply walk to my workbench in the Basement O' Crap, reach up, grab the handles, shout YAR-VOLE HERR CAPITAIN, DIVING ZE BOAT!⁹ and pull the levers down↑
9. Traditional↑
10. I've formed the belief that running around trying to improvise a fire extinguisher after the water has been turned off lends any plumbing job an air of unacceptable amateurishness and opens one to unnecessary spousal approbation, and having taken care of the latter possibility it seemed prudent to deal proactively with the former↑
11. And it seems that water flow from all drains has improved. Fingers still crossed↑