How Not to Fix a Leaky Faucet

Day 1

Come to the realization that the water that has started dripping from the faucet trunk is running down under your sink into the cabinet.  Swear at the sink, the counter and just in general.  Then shut the water off to the offending piece of kitchen appliance.  Next, make a trip to Home Depot, in the next town, thinking that you will get some useful information with some general questions regarding your brand of faucet.  Wear lots of cleavage and some sad helpless eyes.  Wander through the entire plumbing section of Home Depot.  Find no one.  Look helpless long enough that another customer takes pity on you and answers your general questions, but not with anything that is immediately helpful.  Go home and find a youtube video that uses roughly the same type of faucet.  Dismantle most of the faucet.  Pry on the middle piece a while, as this is the piece that needs replacing and “should pop right out.”  It won’t.  Ask your roommate, who is considerably taller than you, to try to pull it out because she should have more leverage.  Laugh a little when she punches herself in the forehead when the vice grips slip loose.  Feel really terrible when she tries again and bloodies her nose. Load the dogs in the back of the pickup.   Drive to Lowe’s, in the next town,  to ask about purchasing a cartridge puller. Feel disappointed but hopeful when the nice plumbing guy tells you that he doesn't have it, but Home Depot might.   Purchase various other necessary things for around the house.  Try to open the topper with the key.  Try some more.  Help fit roommate through the side window of the topper to try to open the topper from the inside.  Drive back to Home Depot with the roommate in the back of the pickup with the dogs,  and purchase said puller after the guy at Lowe’s describes it, but tells you that Home Depot might have it.  Drive home with your cartridge puller. Give permission for roommate to pry a pop rivet loose from the inside of the topper to get her and the dogs out of the back of the pickup.  Carefully open the little box that the cartridge puller comes in.  Use the puller to easily extract the whole middle part of the guts of your faucet.  Give up for the night because it is now eleven pm and you have to work tomorrow. 

Day 2

After work, take the guts of your faucet, along with the broken decorative plate thing from the top of the faucet, to the helpful plumbing guy at Lowe’s, who takes 5 seconds to hand you what you need.  Confidently go home and slide the new faucet guts into place.  Begin to reassemble the faucet in reverse order of the way the thing came apart. Get the thing back together…mostly.  Take it back apart to try to figure out why the handle is pointing downward.  Do the previous three steps several times.  Have a moderate tantrum and hand the tools to your roommate.  Realize that either you, in the process of this project, or whoever put this all together the first time, has stripped out some threads on some of the parts.  Stomp your feet.  Have the roommate search for the right pieces on line.  Give up because it is again 11pm and you work in the morning.

Day 3

Drive to Home Depot again after work.  Return your carefully repackaged cartridge puller.  Stand in plumbing long enough to be irritated enough to begin making loud annoyed comments about the lack of help in this place.  Wait for the high school kid who finally shows up to go track down someone who knows anything about plumbing.  Show the plumbing lady a picture of the kit that is shown online on Home Depot’s website.  Try not to come unglued at the lady when she tells you that she doesn’t have it and it could be here in three to five business days.  Drive to Ace Hardware.  Show the friendly older gentleman at Ace the picture of the pieces that I need.  Nearly burst into tears when he says he doesn’t have it.  Resolve to buy a new faucet instead.  Triumphantly bring home the new faucet.  Realize it is for a four hole sink and you have a three hole sink.  Panic a little.  Call the Ace Store in town and ask if they will take a return.  Profusely thank the girl who tells you that she will.  Drive to the Ace store.  Trade the four hole unit for a three hole unit.  Return home again, triumphant.  Ask the roommate for help because her arms are longer.  Offer encouragement as she attempts to figure out how to remove the old faucet, now mostly in pieces, from the sink.  Get very frustrated and have a meltdown when, between the two of you, you can’t figure out how to get the thing loose.  Call any available fathers or grandfathers for advice.  Read online accounts.  Instruct, the now very frustrated and tired roommate how to take it apart.  Offer words of encouragement and attempt to hold the faucet still while she attempts to unscrew the nut holding the whole contraption together.  Decide that none of the tools currently in our possession will work in this tight a space.  Give up for the night.  You guessed it, it is 11pm and you have to work tomorrow.

Day 4

Gather more tools from any available male family member, which they say will do the trick.  Take them home and try a couple out.  Drive to Wal-Mart.  Buy a basin wrench.  Return home and again encourage the roommate, as she wedges herself under the sink to try to loosen the offending nut.  Cheer and have moment of celebration when you are finally able to pull the leaky, miserable, root-of-your-problems faucet loose.  Apply silicone to the baseplate of the new faucet.  Adjust the plate on the back of the sink.  Push the pipes coming from the bottom of the new faucet through the middle hole.  Cringe when the roommate starts laughing sarcastically.  Take a look at the six inch gap between the pipes coming up from the house and the ones coming down from the new faucet.  Burst into tears a little.  Offer encouragement to the roommate as she tightens the new faucet into place.  Give up for the night.  It is only ten o’clock tonight.

Day 5

Go to Ace again after work.  Haul in piece that is too short to connect the house to the faucet.  Laugh maniacally when the nice plumbing man jokingly says, “buy two of them.”  Let him describe exactly how things should go together under the sink.  Smile as you pull the second connecter from the shelf in front of him.  Cram yourself into the cupboard under the sink.  Twist everything together as instructed.  Turn the water on.  Spray yourself right in the face as you lay wedged in a cupboard.  Turn the water off and take a moment to recover from drowning.  Make another attempt at screwing everything together, while saying mean words to it in a nice tone.  Remove yourself from the cupboard before turning on the water.  Tada.  Take pictures of the water running from the new faucet with you cell phone so that you can send them out as Christmas cards.  Sit down on the couch and have a beverage.  It’s Friday.  No work tomorrow.

Epilogue

Take your roommate out for an ice cream cone for putting up with a four day sink project and the assorted degrees of meltdown involved in the project.  If this ever happens again, seriously consider calling a plumber.

Camping with the Blohms.

                When I was ten, my family took a weekend camping trip with the Blohms. My younger sister, Rene, and I were each allowed to bring one friend along for the fun.  Rene invited Britni, who had been Rene’s best buddy forever.  I invited Sarah, who had been my friend and classmate since the beginning of elementary school.  We loaded ourselves and all of our camping gear into the motor home, hitched up the boat, and drove the four hours to Canyon Ferry Reservoir near Helena. 

                We arrived and all four of us rolled and bounced out of the motor home to be watched by the Mike and Sheila Blohm while Mom and Dad went to the boat ramp to unload the boat.  Josh was also ten and my oldest friend, being just twelve days younger.  Maria was eight and smaller than Rene, but her dry sense of humor and quick witt made up for her size.  Travis came camping with the Blohm family.  He was a couple years older than Josh and I, and probably the coolest person Josh knew at the time.  He was also, as it turned out, the coolest person Sarah had ever met to this point.

We caught crawdads in the lake and swam from shore in the swimming area.  We water-skied and rode the ski-bob and inner-tubes behind the boat.  These were usual camping activities along with fishing from the boat and shore, swimming from the boat, and our dads having boat races with us cheering from inside the boats.

There were many highlights from this particular trip that had started out like so many other camping trips had and have over the years.  I believe it all started with us kids begging to swim around the boats out in the middle of the lake.  We did this often, but usually in swim gear.  For whatever reason, this particular day found us jumping from the boats and swimming around them  in whatever clothing we had chosen for the day.  We splashed and played until a strong cold wind put an end to our fun.  We climbed back into the boats and headed for shore.  Dad’s boat decided that it wasn’t going to play nice and Mike had already taken off for shore ahead of us.  This left several of us shivering in the rain as Dad first tried to fix whatever was wrong, then fired up the trolling motor for the slow trip back to shore.  When Mike got to shore and realized we weren’t right behind him he came back.  Dad lifted me and Sarah into Mike’s boat and we headed for shore shivering with blue lips.  Mom and Dad continued their slow troll back to shore.  Since we were all in soaked clothing from swimming, Sheila had started a large campfire and the kids who were already on shore had changed clothes and draped the wet clothes over lawn chairs close to the fire in hopes that they would dry since it had already finished raining.  Sarah and I changed and added our clothing to the assortment decorating the campsite.

Once the wind died down a little, we decided that we should go for a hike.  All of us, except Dad and Mike, who were going to have a nap, left the campsite with the fire still burning.  We hiked around the bay we were staying in and over the hill before the wind came up again and we decided to head back to camp.  We found quite a display upon our return, though.  Several of the lawn chairs had blown into the fire dumping some of the clothing in as well.  There was a pair of tube socks that burned all the way up to the stripes and then stopped along with an assortment of other scorched clothing.  A pair of Josh’s underwear disappeared completely.  No one is sure whether they went into the fire or blew away.  He was mortified, which was compounded by the rest of us teasing him that someone was driving down the road with his tighty whities trailing from their motor home antenna.  While we were all sitting around the fire after the hike, Sarah was flirting, as ten-year-old girls will, with Travis while sitting in a lawn chair beside him.  She kept trying to move her chair closer and closer until she was on uneven ground and tipped her lawn chair over on him.  She immediately turned bright red which only encouraged the teasing she endured for her little girl crush.

To close out the afternoon, Josh, Sarah and I went fishing from shore.  We were a fair distance from both the campsite and the spot where Mike and Dad were trying to fix the boat.  I cast out as far as I could and at exactly the same moment a seagull swooped down out of the sky under my line.  The lure proceeded to wrap the seagull in it.  The bird crashed to the water and then thrashed like only an angry seagull can until it was hopelessly tangled.  Josh sprinted for Mom and Sheila, who were in one of the campers, while I wrestled the rod with the mad bird at the end of my line.  They at first refused to believe him when he told them that I had caught a seagull.  They finally decided that he should go tell the dads.  So Josh, now frustrated and out of breath, ran toward the boat hollering about the bird that I had caught.  They also had their doubts about the truthfulness of his story, but they could see the downed bird from their vantage in the boat.  Down the beach they came clad in heavy leather gloves.  My dad stood with his hands on his hips while asking questions like, “How did you manage that?” and “Now what are we going to do with it?” He took the rod from me and began to reel as Mike prepared to tackle the bird when it reached the shore beak wide open, threatening.  The two men wrestled the bird to the ground and successfully untied it.  The bird, for its part, left in a noisy hurry for the far side of the lake as soon as it was free. 

The evening started with a bang, literally.  Mike was in the camper when a car came down the road through the camping area.  As it reached us, the occupants tossed out a string of lit firecrackers which exploded in a series of loud pops mimicking machine gun fire as it hit the ground.  Mike came thundering out of the camper wearing a t-shirt and Bermuda swim trunks with his tall black cowboy boots as a Sherriff’s department vehicle pulled up to see what all the noise was about.  Dad hollered at him, “Damn it, Mike, I told you not to do that!” just as the deputy stepped out of the car.  Mike sputtered and turned red as everyone else laughed.  Dad went on to explain that a car had driven by and thrown the fireworks out the window.  I’m not sure the deputy was convinced, but there were no tickets written.  Once all the excitement had ended, the rest of the warm summer evening was spent with Mike bringing out his guitar and singing “camping” songs.  Most of these were not to be repeated in polite company.  There were creative renditions of The Bear Went Over the Mountain, Do Your Ears Hang Low, and other common songs, as well as a ditty about a dirty little devil whose mama may or may not have known he was out.  Sarah and Britni were told explicitly not to sing these songs in front of their moms.  Sarah, however, could not contain herself and was singing the former to her mother as my mom was turning red and hurrying to unload Sarah’s stuff from the car in Sarah’s driveway when we got home.  I don’t think Sarah was ever allowed to go camping with us again…

The next morning began early when my dad’s Uncle Bill discovered that we were camping close to where they were camping and invited us to eat breakfast with him and two of his friends.  The average age of these men had to be early to mid seventies.  They insisted that they cook for us on their grill.  What a feast we had!  The dogs ate at least as much as the kids, since all pancakes were served through the air.  The master of the grill would flip the finished flapjacks high into the air and we kids would scramble to gulp down the one on our plate so as not to miss out on the next one sailing through the air.  The dogs were quick to snatch up any that hit the ground.  We all laughed until our sides and bellies hurt at the antics of these three old men. 

That afternoon we took a ride to Cemetery Island to play and hike.  We hiked to the top of the island to gawk at the grave markers, the only visible remnant of the town that used to sit at the foot of this hill that was now an island in the middle of a rather large lake.  We caught crawdads and chased those who were less brave with them.  Sarah and Britni, less accustomed to camping and the ick that came with it, were more hesitant to pick up the squirming, shelled, clawed critters.  We have pictures of them standing with some of the rest of us while we held the crawdads, since that was as close as they would get.  Rene, girly as she was, loved every last second of torturing someone else with a crawdad.  Maria definitely entered the chaos as well. 

Somewhere in the warmest part of the day it was decided that Josh, Travis, Sarah and I would learn to water ski.  Everyone gave advice at the same time as I was readying to try for the first time.  “Don’t let go of the rope.”  “If you fall, let go right away.”  “Hold on tight, the boat will pull hard.”  Mom stood in the water to hold me steady as I pulled the skis on and steadied my nerves.  I yelled, “Hit it!” and the boat lunged forward pulling hard on the already taut rope.  All I could think was:  “Hold on.  Don’t let go,” as I flopped face first into the water, my feet popping out of the skis being dragged deeper and deeper underwater as the water shot into the air over my head.  I think I drank half the lake before my hands popped free of the ski rope.  I believe Sarah’s experience was similar, since I watched her flop forward and a windshield of water sail up from her hands over her head before she too plunged to the bottom of the lake before resurfacing sputtering and coughing.  As I recall, the boys fared a bit better, but I don’t recall anyone but Travis actually getting up.  The littler girls did not even attempt this feat, which probably means they were either smarter or less adventurous than the rest of us.  Maybe both.

The Blohm and Teeters families have been on many adventures together over the years.  Many of my memories from childhood include the Blohm kids.  This trip, though, had to have been one of the most interesting and eventful camping excursions ever recorded.  At least in the modern era.