Personal

Maybe, maybe not. To be determined. All I know is that for the last year or so, I sat in a little room, masked up and pretty much chained to an x-ray machine developing software for the company’s next generation system. The people there were nice, the product was interesting but I just decided I couldn’t take it any more. Most places where I have worked I’ve been able to shift my hours around a bit so that I could come in early and leave early, allowing me to have a little bit of time to do the things that I want. Unfortunately, at this place for a good portion of the year they held meetings from 5 to 6 …

I spent my morning cleaning up the mess made by our broken waste pipe. Good times. As I mentioned yesterday, we finally found a plumber that could make it to the house before Thanksgiving. He did his job and this morning I did mine. I suited up in my best decontamination gear, grabbed the wet/drive vac, slid it into the crawlspace and climbed in behind it. Maneuvering through the massive curtains of spiderwebs, I made my way to the spill and vacuumed up the majority of the sludge. Once that was finished, I grabbed a sprayer and soaked the whole area with a mixture of bleach and water. Hopefully that will kill any nasty bacteria or fungus that might find …

Yesterday, I posted about discovering a leak in the upstairs drain pipe that connects to the main drain the empties into our septic system. Bad enough in most houses but unfortunately in our house the plumbing is located in a crawlspace. To make matters worse, every plumber we contacted was short staffed because of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and said they wouldn’t be able to get to us until next week. What a freaking nightmare. Late yesterday afternoon one of the plumbers called back and said that he would come down and have a look at it. He did, said he didn’t think it would be that big a deal and told me he would show up the next day …

We purchased our house many years ago and although I am mostly satisfied with it, there are a few things about it that I’ve come to hate. Probably the number one problem on my list is that while half the house has a cellar, the other half sits on top of a crawl space. This limits how much storage space we have available (exacerbated by the lack of an attic) but even worse since a lot of the plumbing is in the crawlspace, when something goes wrong it is a disaster to deal with. Over the weekend I went down in the cellar to check some mouse traps I had put down during the week and while I was down …