I decided to try to get cool son-in-law points this weekend. My mother-in-law had grown frustrated by a leaking kitchen sink. They’d had a plumber out, but that hadn’t worked. So I said, “Let me go get, and install, a new faucet for you.” The old one was, well, old. And they have weird water, so a new fixture wasn’t uncalled for.
It went like this. I went to Lowe’s. Found a faucet. I purchased some other things because my in-laws don’t have the widest array of tools on hand. I took half the old faucet out and realized I didn’t get a big enough crescent wrench. Grrrr. Having failed at my first goal of going to one hardware store for this project, we went to Walmart and got some more crescent wrenches. And then I labored at the silly old faucet and it’s decades old components for a good long while.
Finally, the new one went in, but I kept running into a leak from the supply hose. The cold one was fine, the hot supply line was a spraying mess. I tried, oh how I tried, to make it work. After a late lunch I, grrrrrrrrr, went to the local small hardware store for new supply hoses. A guy walked me right to them and, showing the amount of studied disinterest that indicates he’s almost ready to work at Home Depot, he showed me the many size options available. I took the most likely candidates and then I asked the guy “Why do you suppose this one is leaking?
The old one was a plastic-rubber style, popular in the 1980s or so. It was undamaged. He looked down the hose. “No rubber seal.” I showed him the old cold supply hose. It worked just fine. He glanced at it, turned and walked away mumbling, “I don’t know.”
This guy need to be wearing a vest in a big box store, ASAP.
Anyway, we got the sink working. It does not spray under the cabinet. It does not drip when she turns it off. My mother-in-law is very pleased. Despite that project dragging on way longer than it should, and longer than I’d promised, I think I might be the number one son-in-law now.
We went for a run, just before darkness fell.
We had great sunset views along the beach for one of our favorite 5Ks.
But then, when the sun went down, it went down quick.
On the far off, westernmost point over the sound we saw the sun go down. It turned dark before I could get there, despite an almost-sprint to make it to the beach. But imagine about two thirds of this amount of sky in that brilliant red.
Also today The Yankee got her mother’s new iPad set up. And, tonight, she digitized all of their old slides using a machine I picked up this year. There’s 1,100 of them, all sitting on an SD card, and in the cloud, and in all of those carousels. We looked at the first several hundred of them on their TV this evening. Their daughter was a really cute kid.
