Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Remember: That which does not kill you was simply not permitted to do so for the purposes of the plot." -- Shamus Young, DM of the Rings" 2006-09-15

I think I'm entitled to some whining this morning.

I would like to have gone with my housemate to his PhD dissertation defense today (and he would have appreciated my taking pictures), but I guess it's a good thing neither of us were counting on that (my body is awfully damned unreliable as early in the morning as he was planning to leave). So here's how it unfolded from my point of view:

I took my sleep meds earlier than I usually do, hoping that This Time they'd actually put me to sleep instead of just helping me along when I was already close to it, for a change. To give the sleep meds a fighting chance, dinner was egg+cheese+potato, for the tryptophan. I, uh, think I may have sortakinda almost felt the drugs go by my brain on their way from my stomach to my kidneys, as there was a half hour or so in there, starting a while after I took them, when I did start to feel just a wee bit drowsy (not ehnough so to make me pull over if I'd been driving, mind you). But that passed.

(Note that I get terribly sleepy at the wrong times. So I miss some things because my body decides to fall over in the afternoon.)

So. Lying awake in the dark. Trying to figure things that might lutll myself to sleep. Finally start nodding off just as the alarm rings at six, and then fall asleep, feeling by then too damned tired from having been awake at night. Think, "well maybe a really short nap and I can get up and get ready in a hurry". ("Wanna see me pull a rabbit out of a hat?" "That trick never works." "This time for sure!")

Oh, but some part of me was still trying to wake up and get ready eeven in my sleep, I guess, because I woke up very quickly when my housemate tapped on my bedroom doorframe to tell me, on his way out of the house, that the hot water shutoff to the shower had broken, and water was gushing and wouldn't stop. He asked whether there was yet another shutoff valve upstream from that one, and I said, "Yeah, in the basement," and when I found out that he had been planning to leave Right Then (at that point I still kinda hoped I could just get ready Really Really Quickly if I woke up just a leeetle bit more), I said I'd take care of it -- his being made late to his defense and probably frazzled, by spending time tracing pipes in my basement, would have been a very bad thing, and groggy as I was, I was awake enough to realize that.

So he dashed off and I pried myself out of bed to find out what "Gushing. Well not exactly gushing, but it's a lot," meant. (I'm inclined to call it gushing. It wasn't coming out As Fast As Possible (y'know, with all valves wide open), but it was a lot closer to that than it was to being a trickle or a quiet little column of water. I think that when it makes a whooshing sound we're allowed to call it gushing, right? I mean, I was standing there thinking, "If this were blood instead of water, this rate of blood loss would kill an elephant pretty quick. Enough flow to bleed out an elephant ought to be called 'gushing'." (I do not claim to have been absolutely 100% awake when I thought that, despite being out of bed and standing upright.)

You see, the hot water tap for the tub/shower had started leaking a while ago, and while I suspect it just needs a new washer, I never did figure out how to get it apart (all I managed was to get the knob off), so when that became a trickle instead of a drip, I started using the shutoff valve on the pipe where it came out of the floor outside the tub. (This is a freestanding clawfooted tub, not a built-into-the-wall thing, with a shower modification added sometime before I moved in but late enough that the box it came in was still around then.) That external cutoff valve was what had now died.

So I used the toilet and washed my hands in lukewarm water (the actually-hot water all having drained away long since) because I knew where the next valve in the line had to be, and I wouldn't have any hot water at all to wash my hands with for a while. For some silly reason I expected there to be a valve on the hot side of the water heater, but (duh) it's on the cold side. And yes, I did remember, a few minutes later, to turn off the water heater's gas so it wouldn't try to heat an empty tank and do goodness-knows what damage.

Now I'm sitting here, with no hot water and having had only seventy five minutes of sleep all night, trying to wake up enough to make a rational decision regarding whether to start phoning plumbers and hope I can afford one or to fortify myself with homeowner DIY web sites and grab a wrench and possibly make a mess (with lots of one-liners about plumbers having to work harder because of not being called until after a do-it-yourselfer screwed things up, but also with memories of my father and an ex-housemate making the process of repairing a faucet seem really straightforward). And whining here until my brain catches up.

So I don't get to hear my housemate's presentation for his defense, nor do I get the needed sleep that had looked like the alternative. He'd better really kick butt in there -- I'm gonna need something to celebrate by the time today is over. He should be starting about five minutes after I post this. He should have started about five minutes ago (first attempt to post this didn't work.)

(And Perrine, of course, having observed people Up And About really early, has decided that it must therefore be Time To Feed The Cat, and has been nagging me about that,)

Housemate got his PhD. And brought wrenches to use because I can't find mine. Now to go to hardware store, valve stems from both valves in hand (and digital photos of the more confusing of the two valves) to ask a salesperson for advice and the right size washers. Really would prefer a shower before going out in public, but for obvious reasons I don't get to do that (not sure I could stand a cold-water-only shower long enough to get soaped up and rinsed off. Maybe in August, but not today.) Torn between making other stops while I'm out, or getting home as quickly as possible.

Also want a nap. Still operating on 75 minutes of sleep. Spent a lot of time begging Google for instructions and diagrams regarding different types of valves; discovered that the one I was able to get apart with the tools I could find doesn't match any descriptions I found. But now the other is apart as well, and is exactly as one of the home repair web sites said.

Oh [expletive], rush hour has started, hasn't it?

PS to silmaril: Yummy cake!

I found a very close hardware store, saving me from actually getting into rush hour traffic. The valve that didn't look like any of the descriptions, photos, or diagrams on the web? The guy behind the counter at the hardware store said, "Oh, that's not from a faucet, that's from a shut-off valve." After I confirmed that, he continued, "when those go bad they want you to replace the whole stem. You're not supposed to be able to fix those. But we can fix 'em. I'll have to put the washer on for you though, 'cause you'll never get it on there yourself."

Actually, I think I screwed up by forgetting a step ("try to find any remnants of the missing washer inside the valve (which is positioned where I can't actually look)") in my haste to get everything back together. But it appears to be working well enough for now -- the cutoff valve is acting a little funny but the faucet does its job, and sometime when I'm feeling more patient I can shut off the hot water in the basement again and have another shot at the cutoff valve. Until the faucet goes bad again, the cutoff valve shouldn't matter.

So now to wait for the water heater to come up to temperature, take my long-delayed shower, and then see whether I remain standing long enough to help the freshly doctorated (doctorified) housemate celebrate. I'm still running a big sleep deficit, so I may wind up falling over after my shower. We'll see.

Managed to keep my body going long enough to go out to dinner to celebrate my friend's academic achievement; am kicking myself for not having brought a tape recorder. Much to say (after organizing my thoughts into something that'll pass for coherence) about education and tribes and ways/patterns of thinking, and who my "us"es and "them"s are. (Short version: on some levels I mostly identify with people way the hell more (formally) educated than I am, except that sometimes I notice what amazingly impressive people I'm chatting with.)

Once I stopped moving, the fatigue caught up with me very quickly. Tonight is not the time to try to organize those thoughts, just to enjoy the memory of a grand evening helping a friend celebrate and having a fun conversation with nifty, impressive people. Oh yeah, and the food was good too, (The place I suggested turned out to be closed Mondays, so we wandered the neighbourhood and picked a restaurant I'd never been to. But after all, how far wrong can you go in Little Italy?)