Saturday, April 19, 2008

Oh, the irony! Homeowner's woes and other stuff

Okay, so I have had this really slowly-draining bathtub for a few weeks now. I started out by trying to plunge and snake out the drain with no success. Then I tried a variety of drain cleaners, starting out with an environmentally-friendly enzyme, and then trying a couple of more poisonous drain openers (with apologies to Mother Earth, I was desperate). No luck. So I finally called "Roto-Rooter" and this very nice man came out with his larger, electric snake thing that in my experience, usually clears even the worst clogs.

He went down into my basement to look at the pipes and said, "You have the worst trap setup imaginable." Oh, joy. He said that he had about 50% success in clearing this type of pipe but he'd give it a try. So he went in with his electric snake and, well, had absolutely no success.

The estimate for replacing the pipes wasn't as bad as I thought, but I can think of a million more entertaining things that I could do with that money.

The irony of it is that just a few days after putting an inordinate amount of money on my Visa card for the Robert Plant Alison Krauss concert, I will end up putting another huge bill on it for the new drain pipes.

As one of my friends who lives in a very large, beautiful, and high maintenance older home said, "It's never just a leaky faucet. You end up having to re-plumb the whole house."

On a more exciting note, I will be seeing the Dalai Lama tomorrow. Maybe afterward I'll actually have something interesting to say.

I am also doing very badly at both my accounting class and National Poetry Writing Month. It seems that both the logical and the creative parts of my mind decided to run off for a vacation somewhere. It's weird: usually I am either very creative, very logical (handy in an MBA program), or both. I don't normally hit a mental roadblock in both areas of my brain. This is exceedingly strange to me.

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