Got the Ol' Lawnmower Blues

When I was a lad I earned money by going about talking neighbors into letting me mow their yard or wash their car. I had those as chores at home  too. To my mind I didn't get paid to mow my own backyard, although I got a quarter allowance every week. Somehow the idea of that quarter being earned income didn't compute in my pee-wee brain. I was a notorious procrastinator when it came to chores, except burning the trash in the big 55 gallon drum out back. I liked to light a fire and pretend it was a burning city.

Sometimes on those really hot days of August washing the car wasn't so bad either.

But I had little fondness for lawn mowing then or ever after. I considered it one of the great flukes of mankind or was it one of the curses placed on Adam after the fall. What a brilliant idea this, shave down the grasses and create a perpetual labor to be repeated ad nauseum during the hottest months of the year.

Nonetheless, through the decades I have managed to manicure my own grounds to the satisfaction of county codes, if not always to the particulars of some of my more green-thumb cursed neighbors.

As a boy, of course, I used a push mower, you know, no motor, all elbow grease. Very few people around had a power mower in those days, except those some where above the average blue collar families such as mine. Despite the fact that power mowers became to eventually outnumber the old muscle powered devices throughout suburbia, I continued to use such devices halfway into the 1990s.

I probably wouldn't have stopped then if my thyroid hadn't blown it circuits. When that gland decided to go rogue it sapped away my strength, even to the point I could barely walk. I certainly wasn't in shape to force a mower over our less than even grounds. I broke down and bought my first power mower. That was some time around 1995.

I think it ran pretty well for several years, but everything breaks eventually and one day I found it lying still behind the shed, four wheels motionless toward the sky. I tried CPR (crank, pull, repeat), but it was too little too late. It was gone. I went out and bought a replacement.

This time I got one of those self-propelled babies with the big bag on back. Man, it was just more ease on a task I despised, and we found we could suck up autumn leaves in that bag. If there was something I disliked more than mowing, it was leaf raking. Hey, you were dumb enough to jump off that tree, so just lay there and rot!

My wife never quite shared my attitude. She believed in a proper disposal of departed leaves, so crunching up dead leaves in a bag was a blessing.

That mower went belly up as well after a few seasons. It didn't seem to last as long as the former one

actually. The problem was in the self-propulsion. Something kind of went off track there and I couldn't get it back where it should be and the machine became a bear to push. I shoved it aside into the lawnmower graveyard (pictured right) and went out and bought another of its kin, only with more power and bigger bag.

Well, this did me well until two years ago and suddenly it got temperamental. It'd start up instantly, but after I mowed several rows it would sputter out. It would rest a bit and then stubbornly not start until about the time pulling cord had turned my arm into a rubber band. Over the course of summer these rests grew longer and the starts grew harder and finally it gave up the ghost.

I thought this sounded like a clogged fuel filter. I went to Sears and found a fuel filter that I though was for my machine. I even asked the clerk and he agreed, so I bought it. I went home and torn the thing apart and what to my surprise did I find? This model mower did not have a fuel filter.

Thus last year I went up to Home Depot and got a new mower. I stood there and stared at an old-time push
mower for a long time, but since my wife often chooses to go out and mow the front yard (before neighbors begin throwing things), I figured she would prefer an engine. Our budget is an ever shrinking commodity anymore, so I went for the cheapest power mower on display, just over a hundred buck. (I think the non-powered push mower actually cost more.)  This was your basic basic. It had wheels and it had a blade and it had a motor, but you supplied the push. There was no bag. It simply mulched up the grass and spit it out over the lot. It was a cool black.

It was wonderful. Without those self-propellant gears and no bag growing fuller by the row it proved light and fast. I mean I could blaze through all my yards and even do the east side of the house where none of my other mowers choose to go. We use to have to go hack that stuff down with weedwackers and sling blades.

But not real long into the season something odd happened. I was racing along in the back yard with the mower roaring when suddenly it started going put-put-put. It kept running and it kept cutting, but at a snails pace. I tiptoed along behind. If I sped too fast into high grass it would stall. But then after several more rows of this turtle speed it would kick up into high gear again and we would be back whizzing along lopping off their heads. And then again back to put-put-put. We nursed this thing through the summer and fall, but then it too gasped out one last put-put and died.

Wednesday I was back in Sears looking at lawn mowers. It isn't that I wanted to buy a new mower and my budget is even worse than last year, but the grass is inching up and we must do what we must do. I admit, I stood again drooling over the old powerless push mower, but because of recent health issues I have once again grown weak and need the motorized help.

I next turned my sights on a battery powered mower. Wouldn't that be nice if it could do the job? There
would be no more running to the gas station and no more of that terrible noise. I could be environmentally friendly mowing away in peace and quiet. I inquired of the clerk about this machine. She was very nice, very helpful. It seemed it would do my sized lot, but battery charge (6 hours to fully charge) would depend on length of grass (keep it under 2 inches), and how wet the grass is (keep it pretty dry). I was tempted, but still didn't want to spend the money on something that might not do the job.

I turned and pointed to the cheapest gas-guzzling, plain vanilla, bagless animal and said, "Ill take that one." After paying the $170 (oh yeah this was the absolute cheapest one and on sale no less), I went down to the pickup area to receive my purchase. I dutifully pulled my car up along the loading zone. Inside I ran my receipt over a scanner and my name popped up on a status screen above my head. Shouldn't take long, I was the only one there.

As I waited in my queue of one a stock person came out the flappy doors of the warehouse and passed by me.

What a downcast face he had. His chin was so low it was in danger of being bumped off by his shoe. He looked like the dead walking.  I got the feeling he wasn't overly thrilled with his lot in life, but he was quickly gone before I could offer him any solace. He would have probably eaten my brain if I had anyway.

A time or so later the warehouse doors flopped outward again and another glum young man came out behind a flat cart on which perched a large box. He said nothing. As he angled forward I could see "Lawn Mower" in big black letters on the side of the box. Ah, this must be mine!

He continued mutely pass me and out the door to the sidewalk, then down a ramp in the curb and around my car. Still not a word, no, "Are you Mr. Meredith?", no, "You waiting for a lawnmower?", no simple, "Hello". I walked to the rear of my car and opened the truck. He lifted the box off the hand truck and slid it in. Still not a word. I think Sears has Zombies manning their customer service pickup.  I think he might have mumbled something when I said, "Thank you," but I couldn't make it out. He never even asked to check my receipt. He never even looked my in the eyes. I could have been anyone just snatching up a free lawnmower and he wouldn't have cared.

I worked as a stock person most of the last decade. This is not how I ever dealt with customers. This is not the way any store should want to be represented by their employees. I don't get these young men. With where the unemployment rate is these days (and it is understated to boot) any one having a job should be grateful to have it. If you don't like your job, then look for something else, but don't take your frustration out on the client.

Enough preaching, I drove home to assemble my new acquisition. I soon learned what a sad state I am

in these days. I cut open the box and lifted it out. Construction was not complicated. You know, hook a cable on the handle as well as the pull cord. Pull the handles to full height by loosing and tightening some large wing nuts. Attach the mulch guard and the rear wheels. Adjust the front wheels. Put in oil.

I couldn't even finish. By the time I got to attaching the mulch guard I was too tired to stand. I packed up my tools and called it a day.  I went out this morning and finished up. I still need to get gas, but that's okay. I wasn't going to pull the cord and start mowing today in this heat anyway broke the record by 3 degrees today at 88). The grass isn't that bad yet that it can't wait for a cooler day for its execution.

So I tell the little woman I got a new mower. "Does it have a bag," she asked.

"You thinking about the leaves," I asked.

"Yes."

"That's the fall. Let's worry about the leaves when the leaves fall."

Sneak Thieves in the Cyber Night

"Some will rob you with a six-gun,And some with a fountain pen." - Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd"

And some do it with a keystroke and mouse click - Larry Meredith, just now.

I'd say these curs lay about in the bushes at night waiting for the unaware prey to amble unsuspectingly by, but they probably figured out some robotic way of doing their dirty deed.

Well, everybody's out to make a living, I guess or at least a couple bucks. It's just some of us have been willing to work for our bread and butter at something that gives a benefit to somebody in some small way, stockbrokers, insurance companies and politicians exempted of course. Even phony beggars have the guts and decency to show their faces on the streets and put on a show.

These people are basically worthless mold, useless fungi, boot scrapings marring the pathways of our lives. They are practitioners of virtual kidnapping and extortion. They are domain snatchers. I suppose we have to grant them being a step or two above hackers who poison the web world with vicious viruses and identity thieves, but that doesn't make them nice people. Probably what they do is perfectly legal, but it shouldn't be.

Can anyone give me any justification for what they do?

Here is what they do. They troll about somehow looking for domain names that they think have a value to someone and then they snatch the name and offer to sell it for a higher price. They seem to come in two flavors, both about as tasteless as the other.

One kind of buys up domain names they think will be wanted, such as a product name, business or person gaining fame. Hey, you're an emerging singer named Sandy Songbird fresh off American Idol, just gaining some rep and you want a domain to promote your blossoming career. You want people to be able to search for sandy songbird.com and have you pop up, but you discover some mud-encrusted bottom feeder has already snatched up "songbird", "sandysongbird", "songbird", "songbirdsandy" and any other convolution of your name they can think of, and they have done it for .com., net, .org, .info and every other dot whatever out there. However, they'' be happy to sell you the right to your own name for a few thousand dollars.

Then there is the other form of these germs. These watch the registries of existing names about to expire and if the holder doesn't renew on the tick of the deadline, they snatch up the name. Then they can offer it back to that holder for a high price because they believe the person has established their whereabouts and won't want to lose that domain.

Yeah, that's what just befell your's truly. I had three domain names kidnapped this past summer, www.nitewrit.com, www.nitewrit.info and www.lemeredith. They were my oldest Blogs, including my first, "Night Writing in the Morning Light". They other two were my "Nitewrit's Own Companion and Commentary of the Gospels" and "Write On; The Official Website of The Kid and The Old Goat". 

It's my own fault for not keeping on top of things. But I have been dealing with a major family crisis the last six months and not doing much else. Anyone ever following me, if there still are, will have noticed my absents from the blogging scene for mucho weeks recently. Thus, I wasn't thinking about my domain renewals coming up in July.

In normal times I wouldn't have had to. You see, I had my domain's set for automatic renewal against my credit card. Should have been seamless, really; except my bank was acquired by another bank at the end of last year and that bank replaced all my previous cards, including THAT credit card with new ones of their own brand and so when automatic renewal time came about, the domain keeper couldn't find my bank anymore and my domain was quickly snatched up by these bottom feeders.

I tried at first to simply change the domain to one at Blogspot, but they had barred any domain change. Fortunately in Blogger you can retain all your previous posts and comments by a simple download and then upload to a new Blog, so my Blogs still exist, just at different domain names. I'm not going to charge someone some ridiculous fee just to get my old domain names back. Having your own private domain is kind of a pride thing anyway, not really all that important.

I did lose my statistics and, sadly, my followers. So I have the challenge of building new followers or hope some of those who liked those Blogs will find me again. I am planning to be actively scribbling my thoughts and opinions regularly once more at "Night Writing in the Morning Light," now at www.lemnite.blogspot.com and add to "Nitewrit's New Own Companion and Commentary of the Gospels" at www.lemcompanion.blogspot.com. 

I just hope whoever gloms on to my old domain addresses doesn't post anything salacious or scandalous in case an old reader stumbles upon them thinking I have turned to the dark side.

With the Speed of Now Impossible to Play

I'm feeling my age this week. Angry Assassin Arthritis did a hit job on my right foot. The problem with Mr. Arthritis is he doesn't come by once to stick a knife in. He hangs about and keeps twisting the blade. I haven't had an attack for a while. This one was very vicious, I guess to make up for Arthritis long neglect. It began on Tuesday evening in my arch and it was scream-out-loud painful by bedtime.

At 11:30 I hobbled, with grimace and groan, out to the kitchen to pop some pills, in this case Ibuprofen, not the pill of my choice, but the ones available. The fix of my choice would have been Tylenol Arthritis, but you can't get it. It was the only stuff that really worked for me. The Ibuprofen eased the pain some, long enough for me to get to sleep, but it was back full-bore in the morning and I have been popping pills all week, alternating between the Ibuprofen and Aspirin with one hit of Motrin thrown in by the mercy of a co-worker. (Yeah, I have been working this week at my on-my-feet-all-day job.)(

The two days I was off I managed my walks, too, because you can't give in to the Assassin  or next thing you know you give up the walking; you find this excuse or that.

The pain almost went away on Friday and in fact, it left my arch entirely by Friday evening, only to sneak into my big toe and ramp up again. So I took my two Ibuprofens a half hour ago and the pain has lightened and I expect to take my morning amble, but man I am feeling all of my years physically right now.

But last week I was feeling age in a different way. Now I am going to start off sounding like an Old Foggy rambling on about the "Good ol' days of yesteryear," except my yesteryear is more like yesterday.

I've got about 200 CDs stacked up on racks next to my desk. I used to listen to my music all the time as I wrote. For some reason I got out of that habit earlier this year, but last week I decided I wanted to hear my music again. I plopped on my earphones, selected a CD and placed it in my CD player. Silence and the message on the player said, "No Disc".

No disc?  This silvery round thing with the hole in the center looked a lot like a disc to me. I understand sometimes a smudge upon the surface can wreak havoc. I pull the disc out and examine it. There does seem to be a something maybe perhaps there. I wipe it across my sweater and plop it back in the machine.

"No disc."

Okay, I'll try a different singer and a different song. I put this new choice in and close the lid. Whirl, whirl, and the number 01 shows in the window and then, "No disc".  Hmmm. I pull out this disc that apparently doesn't exist and look it over. Ah, yes, definitely something stuck along one edge.  I take it to the kitchen sink and wash it, dry it and return it to the player all pristine and clean, and assumable presentable.

"No disc."

I go to a higher authority, my wife. "Hon," I ask, "have you been having trouble with the CD player?"

She has her own cache of CDs, especially Bon Jovi and The Who, which she does exercising to. She uses the player much more lately than I have.

"Yes," she says.

Tat settles it. She wants her exercise beat and I really do wish to listen to my music. I grab my hat and head out to purchase a new CD Player. Yes, the current one has some years on it now and obviously it has worn itself to a frazzle and cannot perform its duties up to snuff anymore.

First stop, fully expecting it to be my only stop, is Target. I'm looking for cheap, truth be told. I go straight to the electronics department, you known that place one dominated by TV sets, but now a vast warehouse of cell phones. I go up and down aisles, over and over as if some stock clerk might have hurried out to restock, but no CD Players anywhere. There are iPod Docks and MP3 gizmos and for some reason a lot of alarm clocks, but no CD Players.

Now it is down the highway to a Best Buy.

I figure the most logical place to start is the section selling CDs. Wouldn't you put CD players near what they play? I wander about. They have a bunch of karaoke machines (why for heaven's sake!) but I do not see a CD player. Finally I do see a sales clerk, so I ask.

"Sure," she says and leads me off.

We wind our way across the store. "They keep moving things around," she says.  "I think they are over this way."

We have moved over to the far flung sections of the store, over to the desert where once computer software ranged. This is the land of the endangered species and sure enough at the end of an aisle are CD Players.

I thank the clerk and wander into the aisle expecting an array of various CD players to pick from. Ha, there are no CD players down the aisle. No, what there is is only on those shelves on the very end of the displays. I have my choice of ... of... one!

One, and there aren't many of that one left either. I buy the one, an Insignia. It's compact. It has a CD player. It has an AM/FM Radio receiver. It has...well, that is what it has. There is no tape player as my old player had.

Let that be a warning, I think. The tape cassette is gone, gone the way of the 8-Track or the record (vinyl) of the wax cylinder. Soon the CD will also be gone and so will the means to play them.

It is speeding up. Their use to be some manufactures slogan (they are probably gone now too) that said, "Tomorrows Technology Today!" I think the new slogan must be, "Today's Technology Yesterday!"

When I was a little boy my parents had these records. They where about ten inches in diameter with a little hole in the center. They were called 78 RPM records. When I got a little older I got my own record player for Christmas. It played these things about six inches in diameter with a large hole in the middle called 45 RPM Records. Next came the 33 1/3s, which were about twelve inches across and back to a small hole in the middle. I built a large collection of these various records over the years. When I got married we bought this nice Fisher Hi-Fi Stereo

That Fisher lasted a long time, but we had lightening strike one night and it blew out that stereo. I bought a new record player and noticed something. It no longer had a 78 RPM speed. Those old records could not be played.

Then we came to a time we could't find nettles. Then we couldn't even find record players.  I am not talking some long ago, I'm talking less than 20 years here. Cassettes were ruling. (8-tracks kind of come and went quickly.) Now the tape players have disappeared and the CD players are becoming rare.

I am not against progress and new technology, but I have a lot invested in my music collection. I have about 2,000 33 1/3 Album representing a broad spectrum of American music as well as hundreds of 45s and 78s. I had dozens of tape cassettes and as mentioned, 200 CDs. I don't ask time to stop, I simply ask they keep the old technologies around my lifetime so I can still enjoy the media I have.

What Happened to Easy?

A company named Philips has a slogan, "Sense and Simplicity". Well, good for them, I hope they do what they say, but it seems every other business has dropped simple from their vocabulary. I recall once hearing that technology would make life easier. So, why does my most mundane tasks get more complicated?

Like what, you ask?

I'm going to tell you, but first let me ask you a question. How many people does it take to change a light bulb in an automobile?

Three, with at least one having an engineering degree.

Okay, I exaggerate a little; perhaps. That is my car there on the left, a 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt.  The driver-side headlight burnt out recently. Okay, no biggie, bulbs don't last forever and the car is over 6 years old and has nearly 90,000 miles, much of it drove in dark, rain and other conditions demanding headlight use, like the infernal and eternal road construction zones (don't get me started on that boondoggle or we'll be here all night - with half our road in darkness).

Anyway, what does it take to change a headlight, right? I had a headlight blow out before, of course, that was many-years ago; er...decades ago actually. The headlight bulb looked like this one on the right.

There was a thin rim of chrome around its outer edge. You loosened a screw on the bottom of this rim to loosen it. Then you just popped that headlight out of a socket and pushed the new one in, retightened the screw and let there be light!

Took five minutes and you were good to go.

Okay, here is your modern headlight bulb on the left. Sure doesn't look like that old one, does it? Doesn't look anything like that thing on the front of my driver-side fender either. No, it goes inside that thing.

Nothing to it, you just have to dissemble one-quarter of your car to do it. You don't need your screwdriver, though. No, you need a socket wrench, some kind of prying tool and probably, as I did, a pair of pliers. You can see technology is making life simpler all ready, can't you?

Here we go, first lift the hood, duh! Get your socket wrench, with the proper size socket (in metric units) and loosen two nuts holding the headlight assembly. Find the plug holding the fascia to the front above the grill and pull it out. Fascia? What the heck is a fascia? Well, it's that thin molding they stick over a lot of your vehicle. So we have identified the fascia, where is this plug. It said plug, right. My fascia had two plugs, a little one up front and a larger one toward the engine. I had to pop both of these to loosen my fascia. (You got a loose fascia, sounds like some kind of medical condition to me.)

It said you grip the plug, well plugs, with your finger tips and pull them out like you'd pull a toothpick out of an olive. Yeah, if you have the grip of Superman and your olives aren't painted concrete. This is where the prying tool came into play. I had to loosen those babies up before they would pop. The little plug gave the most resistance.

Be certain by this point you have unplugged the assembly wires from the electrical harness. You don't want to mess up your electrical system during the next steps.

Now with the fascia loosened, pull it back a bit, which actually you can't really do. You just got to let it flap a bit and let it go at that. Grab ahold of the headlight assembly and gently pull out slightly toward the radiator and it will come off the two clamps holding it underneath. Be careful not to break anything or it will get real costly. That last warning was a great tension reducer, yes sir.

Okay I got it clear and out. It was big and awkward to hold. It has more than one lightbulb in it you know. Oh yes, you may have to go through this routine a few more times in the life of the car. There is your hazard light and turn signal to consider.

I carried this thing into the kitchen to replace the bulb. It probably does get simple at this point - you'd think. You got the assembly and you're new bulb and it goes in a socket. Trouble is, you have to get to the socket, which is buried in there somewhere. First there is a plastic locking collar around the bulb. You press down and turn counter clock wise, but you better have eaten your spinach before hand. There is a lot of grunting on this step, plus a lot of fear you'll break the dang collar or bulb. Oh man, don't break the bulb 'cause it says it could explode. Anyway, this is where I got my trusty pliers. Yeah, carefully trying to turn this sucker. It's been soldered in there by time, but I did succeed and got this out. Now I had to wrestle the old bulb up from its hole.  Once this was out, there is a socket to unplug.

Now you take your new bulb, which at first doesn't seem to want to settle down all the way in the socket (and remember whatever you do you don't want to break this gas filled little bulb). Next refasten the socket to the back of the bulb and replace the locking collar. Un huh, the locking collar doesn't want to go back in either. Women push babies out easier than this thing pushes back in place. And you got to turn it clockwise when and if you ever get it down far enough. Once that thing turned under it's holding ridges I felt I had conquered Everest.

I carried the reassembled assembly back outside to my car with some trepidation. I had to push this baby back in making certain the bottom lined up with the clamps I can't see. Well, I did it. It was in my fender and the bolt holes in the fender lined up with the bolt holes in the assembly and I got the bolts back it and then the plugs back in the fascia.

All done, so I get in the car, turn on the engine and the headlight on the driver's side does not come on. My car has those automatic headlights. My passenger side came on, but not my new bulb. I turned the lever from auto to on and now both headlights on both side worked. Odd, maybe the auto required a special bulb that I didn't buy? I don't care. I am not tearing that thing apart again. It won't kill me to manually switch on my lights, as long as I remember to manually switch them off when I park.

However, the next day when I went out, both my headlights were coming on automatically and all was well.

And you see how simple it all was.

MODERN INCONVENIENCES: LIVING WITH FRANKENSTEIN

Scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis; The Modern Frankenstein of Technology

ONE: TECHNOLOGY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT

Tap-tap-tap, the Technical History of the Kid

Once upon a time The Kid decided to be a writer. The only thing available in his house when this brainstorm struck was a fountain pen and some onion skin note paper. So this was the medium on which he wrote his first message.

It wasn't very satisfying. The ink smeared easily on the surface and bled through to the other side. He took his allowance and purchased a lined table. This was a bit better. He could write on both sides of the sheet and the lines kept his lettering straight, for his handwriting was never great shakes, or perhaps it was greatly shaky. It was certainly difficult to read (and would deteriorate to total indecipherability as he became the Old Goat). Even at age twelve he knew this would never do.

The nice young librarian at the town library took pity upon him and let the kid peck away at the town typewriter. This limited his "serious" writing to the few hours the Library was open. He began to wheedle and whine for a typewriter of his own. Lo and behold, his grandmother gave him a typewriter on his birthday. It was an old used portable Underwood. It was very similar to the one pictured, except it was older, less shiny and came in a worn black carrying case. It had been brand new sometimes in the 1920s.

But the kid didn't care. To him this was cutting edge technology despite a sticky "e" key. Of all the keys to be stubborn, it had to be the "e" and not the "q". He loved it anyway. It allowed him to write every night for the next ten years.  In 1958 he wrote the first story he was to sell to "Magazine of Horror" called "Last letter to Norman Underwood". (The story sold a decade later in 1968.) It stood as a tribute to the technological marvel he produced it upon, that old Underwood Typewriter.

Sometime in The Kid's twenties, when he had a bit of money of his own, he took a big step up to a shiny new Smith Corona portable. It was all white and looked so streamline with its smooth rounded corners.

But it still came with the same annoyances as the old Underwood, except for the sticky "e" key. The Kid had to keep buying ribbons. He tended to use a ribbon until the keys wore daylight through them and the papers were more embossed than printed. Changing ribbons was a dirty transaction with the new ribbon generally leaving smudges for the first few miles of type, not to mention his fingertips.

If a typo occurred, one dabbed away with White-Out (also tending to smudge and coat his fingertips). If errors or changes were two large, he was required to retyped the blasted thing and to create duplicates meant the horrors of carbon paper (and even more messy fingers).

At one point The Kid even bought a copier. Oh, this was nothing like the Xeroxes to come. This was a clunky plastic bulk of a desktop contraption that required great heat to produce a copy on odd looking paper. He could only copy one sheet at a time and he could only copy eight sheets in a row before the plate got too hot and he had to shut it down to cool. Cooling could take an hour. (And sometimes he burned his ink and carbon stained fingertips on the plate.) [This thing was so ba-a-a-a-a-d, the Old Goat couldn't even Google an image of it!]

Oh how The Kid dreamed there could a magic way to type his stories and not have to deal with carbons and ribbons and heat pads, oh my. And one day along came this possibility...

Sort of...

At lease a first gleam of hope for the future...

The kid bought his first computer, the Atari 400.

It didn't really help at all in all honesty. It was pretty good at running Atari Games, though.

There was no monitor, it hooked up to the TV set. It had no internal storage. It had no printer. There was this flap with Atari upon it on the front. Lifting the flap reveled four cartridge slots inside. This was where the programs went.

The Kid, being all wise,  had also bought an external tape cassette drive with it. This was what the program for Frogger was on, a tape cassette, that took forever to load. By the time it loaded you didn't feel like playing the game anymore, however, tape was also your only storage. You see, he could write his own Basic language programs on this beast and save them on a tape cassette. Big whoop!

It didn't do much for his writing. he could type out a short story and save it to tape, but there was no way to print it. What good was that?

The Kid was disappointed in this reality of the Atari 400, but it gave him hope for something better and sure enough, something better would came along in the years when he was transforming from The Kid into The old Goat.

To be continued.

Tap-tap-tap, the Technical History of the Old Goat

In 1984 The Kid (in mid-transfer to Old Goat) bought an Apple IIc, Apples first portable or compact computer. That was what the c stood for, compact. With a printer and an external disc drive it cost $2100, with all its 1 MHz speed capability. Man of man, did it seem fast...in those ancient days. It had 128K of RAM.

The external disc drive allowed for keeping a program disc in the main drive to run the thing while having a disc in the other drive for storage, rather than constantly switching the discs. It didn't have internal storage. Everything was on 5 1/4 floppy disks.


It came with 5 floppy disks with some software on them:


1. Introducing the Apple
2. The Apple At Work
3. The Apple At Play
4. Inside the Apple
5. System Utilities 

The Monitor was a whopping 9 inches and there wasn't all that much in graphics. It was beautiful if you liked green lettering on a black background, real colorful, eh? The Old Goat thinks the printer was a DOT Matrix type, rather than an Impact, but either way it still used the dreaded ribbon.


The main software was called AppleWorks and it was wonderful. The Kid had word processing, a spreadsheet and a database. The Kid could calculate his budget, could keep lists of his records (uh, for those of you who are not fellow Old Goats, records used to be these vinyl round things with a hole in the center on which was music that you put on a turntable and then played with a needle [Heh! Heh! I know, sounds pretty silly, doesn't it!]) and books. (In a few years the Old Goat will probably have to explain books too once everyone gets nimble with the Kindle.)

And the Kid went to town keying everything he'd written up to that time with that Apple IIc onto 5 1/4 Floppy Disks. The future was now and he had no idea how fleet the future can become yesterday. He should have learned way back in his salad days when he was plugging programs in control boards for such Job-of-the-Future equipment like an IBM 85 Collator. (No, that isn't spaghetti, it's a program.)


But he didn't.

During the early 'eighties The Kid had some influence over the capital budgeting for a big bank. He brought in the idea of sticking these newfangled computers on peoples' desks and even talked his boss into plopping such a project into the business plan. His boss's boss was the Senior Vice-President who ran the whole Operations Department. (In later years this would be called Information Technology, or IT for short. To some IT came to be a bigger monster than that Clown in the Stephen King novel of the same name.)


Well, the boss's boss, who was a brilliant man and a great guy, thought The Kid was off the wall. (Bosses' bosses thought The Kid was off the wall when he wanted to do digital storage and bosses' bosses thought The Kid was off the wall when he wanted to do Check Imaging and it seemed like somebody was always saying The Kid was off the wall. This Kid wasn't off the wall, he was outside the box.)


"Those little things may be fun to play with at home, but have no future in business," said the boss's boss. "The Main Frame is king and always will be king," and so the boss's boss killed the project, much to The Kid's disappointment. 

A year of so later The Kid-turning-Old Goat became the first person in that big bank to have a PC installed on his desk. The Main Frame had its place, but there was a new machine in town and it changed everything. Soon there was another desk sporting one, then another and another until they dominated the desk tops like TV antennas dominated roof tops in the mid-1950s. Main Frames were dead as king, PCs were becoming king, long live the king! Ah, but there was the rub!


The PC was King at work. The Apple was the hobbyist's hobby horse. This was a battle where the better machine hadn't won. 

The Kid-turning-Old Goat made a decision. He wanted his home computer to be on speaking terms with his work computer so he could work either place. However the Apple and the PC didn't get along. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates spoke different languages, so Kid-turning-Old Goat pushed his trusty IIc aside and installed a Compaq Presario, the first in a serious of four such towers to come under the Compaq and then the HP banner that graced his home workstation.


Fine and dandy, The Kid-turning-Old Goat had entered the world of Microsoft Windows, freeze-ups  and crashes, virus threats and Trojan Horses and cords and cables running hither and yon beneath his feet. And now he sat staring at his lifetime of the written word compressed in a bunch of flabby Floppies that weren't on speaking turns with the PC. He wanted his work in the computer, so it was keying everything all over again. He was beginning to think that sticky "e" key and the carbon paper might not have been as bad as he thought.


Now life has moved on and it is the Old Goat who sits behind a keyboard many hours in his remaining years, still pecking out little essays, poems and sometimes stories. Floppy Floppies and hard Floppies have come and gone and all his life's work sits resident on an invisible internal hard disk that will hold gigabytes of data. Backup to the PC is to CDs, which resemble records (see explanation of records earlier in this piece). It seemed a perfect world until one day he are sailing along and struck an iceberg called the Blue Screen of Death and all was gone. It is a good thing the Old Goat was diligent on backing up to those CDs.


But The Old Goat had it with the instability, foibles and failures of the Microsoft miasma. Standing over the stagnant remains of the last Presario, The Kid rose in his memory and his first love strummed upon his heart strings and the memories came back of the Apple of his eye. 

And the ugly gremlin from Microsoft now even speaks to the handsome polished perfect fruit of Apple. All can be right in his world again. He buys an IMac.


And they typed happily ever after -- well, we don't really know that! I mean, life isn't over and you know, the Old Goat is not all that old, so things happen and nobody should say the end with such assurance that everything will always be well and happy.


Yet,  haven't we surely reached the apex of all known technology? The Future is here today, right? Nothing could possibly come along and improve on today, right?

Hey, what's this thing. Its thin and cylindric. Hmm, you move this pointy end over this piece of paper and it makes marks. How interesting. Why you can write with this thing. Now why hasn't anyone ever though of this before? Hmm, thin and pointy? I think I'll call it a pen...

Passing of an ERA (Ever Rapid Anachronism)

So I'm sitting there in the parking lot of a mall late last evening because my wife wanted ice cream. She went into the super market to make her selections and I waited in the car. Most of the smaller stores along the wings were closed, only a few of the bigger stores were open. The super market, obviously, a Borders Bookstore, a drug store and an Office Depot.

That Office Depot is the newest store there, less than a year old.

But it wasn't the newest store that caught my attention.

It was the ones that were missing in the wing behind me. I could see this stretch of stores in my rear view mirror. They were all closed for the night, but their signs sill were lit and a few overnight lambs dimly shown somewhere beyond the display windows. In the middle, though, it was completely dark. It was like looking at a smile with the two front teeth missing. Those two stores weren't just closed, they were kaput, out of business.

The one had been so almost a year. It had just opened a couple of years ago on the cusp of cutting edge. It was being readied at the time my son was out of work and he applied there without success. He was disappointed. He thought it would be a good opportunity. The place was called Theater XTreme. It sold and installed home theater systems. As it turned out, he landed a job elsewhere about a month later where he has done well ever since and Theater Xtreme tanked, along with the housing bubble and the economy, a few months later.

The black hole next door was different. That store had been in there since the mall had opened several years ago. It use to be swarming with people with long lines at the checkout and long hours every day.
I was there many times when my kids were in their teens. Now it was dark. It closed about three weeks ago. It took me back thirty years to a war

No, not the Vietnam conflict, that was over by this time. I was thinking of the outcome of the Video Home System (VHS) and BetaMax war. There is probably a lesson for nations in that war, for everything I've ever heard, BetaMax was the superior product, but VHS won.

I had an early VHS player-recorder. It was a monster, kind of bulky and not very pretty, with too many dials and buttons. It didn't have user-friendly anywhere in the thick instruction booklet. It had a long row of little dip-switches in the back. You had to flick each of these in certain patterns to receive the TV shows in your area through this box. It was a time consuming and frustrating exercise until you got all the switches correctly aligned.

Once setup, it was exciting. Now I could record films off the TV.

It had been a dream of mine as a teen and young man to own my favorite movies. I knew it would never be possible. I bought a movie projector and some films. These were 8-mm. The average movie in those days ran 90 minutes. There reels ran perhaps twenty. Obviously you were getting the Reader's Digest version of the film. This was true theater xtreme.

And they were silent. There was no room on an 8-mm for a sound track. Editors had inserted some snippets of dialogue written on signs here and there in the film. Actually, most weren't even dialogue; they were cues, like "Later..." or "Back in the laboratory..."

But this is what I could afford. You could buy actual full length 35-mm sound movies if you were wealthy and could afford them. occasionally you'd read about kings and potentates and tycoons who enjoyed their own home theaters. It was rare, though, until after the VHS and BetaMax war.

Now you too could enjoy real hollywood films at home. Buying them was still too rich for my blood. A VHS film cost about $100 at first. That was when the video store was born.

It was as if there had been an orgy of entrepreneurs and they all got pregnant. Video stores popped up like Starbucks did years later. Every mall with more than three shops seemed to have a video store. Most were mom & pop enterprises. Two miles from my house were four such places. I joined two of them.

Yes, I said joined.  Those first stores required memberships. You filled out an application, gave them your credit card number and paid a yearly dues, about $35 to $60. Some places offered a lifetime membership that only cost a few dollars more, so I had a lifetime membership in my favorite one.

You got a couple videos for that and for every ten you rented, you would get one free. I got a lot of free videos early on.

Of course,  seeing the success of these places brought out the big boys and chain stores appeared on the horizon. Over the years the mom & pop ones gradually thinned out as large coat-to-coast franchises slipped into the malls. Some smaller shops survived by specializing. I use to frequent one that had a ton of old movies you just couldn't find at the super stores. As big as places like West Coast Video and such were, they didn't have room for more than recent releases and bestsellers.

On the heels of this rental boom, the purchase price of videos dropped. In a few years you could actually afford to own your very own movies. The price had sunk from $100 to under $20. Things were to change rapidly ever after. BetaMax was completely gone from any shelves. VHS eventually had competition from DVDs and tape began getting less and less shelf space. (The last big distributor of VHS tape closed down in December 2008.)

Now you could view new films on your TV or download them to the computer. A place called Netflix came into existence and the late fee disappeared. Ah, the late fee. You could only rent over night once upon a time, except on the weekend. You could rent on Saturday and not have to bring it back until Monday. But if you didn't return your video by a certain time of day, you got hit with a late fee, which equaled one day's rental cost.  You could also be charged a fee if you returned the thing without rewinding. And if you ever lost the cassette, oh boy. You had to pay for the video and even when the prices of buying a film in the retail stores got down to $14.95, the video stores still charged a hundred bucks for a lost copy.

But that era is over. I sat on a parking lot last night looking at a dark hole where Blockbuster used to be. It dawned on me they are all gone around here. Blockbuster had been the last man standing. If I wanted to go rent a video...sorry, a DVD, I wouldn't know where to do so. All those video stores are gone. I don't know a mall anywhere around me now that has such a place. That Blockbuster was the last oasis.

And that Office Depot that opened up on the other end of that mall used to be a CompUSA. There use to be The Computer Store in the mall across the highway, but it closed almost a decade ago. Circuit City went down the other year and stores like Sears and Radio Shack got out of the computer business, too, at least the software end.  Office Depot sells some software for the PC, but only has a thin row of choices. Best Buy use to be full of computers and software, but it has shrunk that department down to a small section along one side.  Another era coming to a end. Hey, times change ever quicker now.

Think about all the obsolete junk that might be laying about your home. And think about this: For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever. 1 John:2:16-18 (NIV)


Everything you get in this world has a shelf life and that shelf life is ever rapidly moving to being an anachronism. Your present life will be an anachronism someday, too, and you'll move on to somewhere else. Forget all this junk you surround yourself with here, which is going to be a moment and then trash. Think about what you really need to treasure before all your treasure is taken away and you spend forever in a black hole where the light of God never reaches. Put your desire in God before God assigns you to the trash heap.

Killing Me Softly with Technology

When I was a young man, a teenager actually, all I wanted was a typewriter and a tape recorder. I felt those were the tools a writer needed to make life easy. I got them both. The tape recorder was fun, but I didn't find it practical. I still had to write down what was said on tape. The typewriter was the main technological advancement from pen and paper for me.

My old battered Underwood Portable did me well for years. Of it could be tedious sometimes. I would use ribbons until a path was shredded in their middle by the battering of the keys. I would become ink smudged from carbon paper. And how annoying it was to edit or discover a missing sentence in the center of page 1 of a 12 page manuscript. It would throw every line off and require retyping everything.

If only I could think it and it would magically appear on the paper.

Then along came the personal computer and this was probably as close to thinking it to the paper as we could get. Editing and making copying all became a cinch.

With the first computers, you couldn't do much more but write documents and do some spreadsheets on Visicalc (if that was the proper name of that first spreadsheet software).  Not counting the Atari 401, my first real computer was an Apple IIc. It had no internal storage, everything was kept on floppies and it only came with an impact printer. But it was a wonderful little machine, very user friendly.

For some reason, the Apple failed to capture the corporate world. My company, like most, went PC and so in a couple years, I did too. I wanted to be able to do work at home and be compatible with the computer I had on the job. Apples didn't speak to PCs in those days.

Thus for the last 2o to 25 years I have lived in the Windows world. Which was fine, I was use to it and what you could do on the PCs kept growing and growing. 

You don't realize how depended upon and spoiled by the computer until you lose it. This past week my PC crashed big time. The only redemption I was offered was to do a system recovery. This wipes out all you have on your hard disk. Fortunately, I did have backups and I was able to backup some more recent files before the big erase, but I know I lose somethings. It is a bigger hassle than you may imagine. 

I sat there knowing I had to reload all this software and then restore all my data and photo files from the CDs I backup on and decided I had had enough of the constant in and out of the windows game.

My decision was to chomp on the Apple again. I now am working through an IMac. After so many years in the PC environment, it is taking some getting use to. I have a whole new system to learn. (At least, I got my photos onto the Mac and was able to pull one up for this post.) 

It is a bit scary, though, how imprisoned we have become to technology. It makes things simpler when it works, but it is a nightmare when it doesn't. 

TWO: PLUMBING THE DEPTHS

Drip Dropping Down the Drain

Twenty-nine years ago I pretty much lost a house to the flow of water. I understand the power of water unchecked. It can take out your ceiling, strip off your wallpaper, warp your floors and shut down your appliances. Beyond all the physical damage it can also flood a young mind with paranoia over even the gentlest patter of a spring rain. Ask my daughter about the years of nightmare and terror she swam through in her early youth.

     I've respected water since that time, but it hasn't shown me much respect at all. It certainly didn't this past month.

     It started with an inconsistent drip. I say inconsistent because it was easily stilled by turning the faucet to the center. If the handle stayed at the extreme hot or the extreme cold point, it dripped. Turn it a few degrees toward center and voila, the drip stopped.

     These things never stay so cooperative forever, of course. Eventually it took a bit more to silence the drip. You had to get it positioned to some exact spot for a while, then you had to slam the handle down more firmly and then you had to slam the handle down with a force like John Henry laying spike on the railroad. You know, ka-boom, sometimes more than once. Yet in the end the drip surrendered and shut up.

     Until a couple weeks ago when the drip did not cease, but instead became a waterfall. Oh, it was a thin waterfall, perhaps a quarter inch in diameter, but one doesn't really want a quarter-inch stream of water flowing day and night, does one? Besides how soon will the quarter inch become a half-inch, then an inch and then come with such viscosity the drain can't handle it.

     So I opened the doors of the vanity and shut the two shut-off valves.

     The steady flow ceased, but the drip returned mocking me and the firmness of the valves with a semi-steady drip...drip...drip.

      I did a little up and down slam of the handle and knew immediately the mechanism was beyond hope. Thinking I may have suddenly received some wondrous handyman abilities, I decided perhaps I could disassemble the device and do something, what exactly I haven't a clue.

      Nothing ventured, nothing gained. That's an old American proverb and I'm an old American, so I get my ratchet screwdriver, pop in a Phillip's head and give it a venture.

      There is a screw on top of the knob. There used to be a gold-colored disc covering where the screw resides, but it popped off and disappeared some years ago, so the screw is right there in plain sight. I slot in the screwdriver and twist. I twist, but the screw doesn't. Okay, a bit more muscle is needed. Unfortunately the screws been working out down at the gym and it ain't budging. I mean, this is one tough monkey of a screw. Usually with the ratchet driver I can defeat your average screw, but this isn't your average screw. This is super screw.

     Maybe it is my screw bit. I dig a larger Phillip's head out of the kit and try it, but it just skims out of the grooves. This screw is not going to come out, which is probably a good thing because what am I going to do if it does? Let stubborn screws lie is my motto.

      It's going to nag at my mind now like a dripping faucet. Oh, wait a minute, it is a dripping faucet. It's a dripping faucet dripping even though I got both pipe shut off valves as tight as they go. It doesn't seem there is anything but this situation growing worse.

  


       It's time to call the plumber.    

How Big was My Vanity?

"Yessir," says the young lady, "you are a premium Customer."

      That is good to hear and what it means is I have the Golden Ticket or the gold yearly maintenance contract anyway.

      "We could have a technician out to your place this morning."

      Technician is it? I'm old enough to remember a day when people had titles that actually meant something.  In this case, technician means a plumber. A plumber is a person who works with lead, although they don't make pipes out of lead anymore since they found out it tends to kill people. But I still prefer plumber because that tells me this person can unclog drains and fix drips...presumably. My great grandfather was in the building trade and he had four sons. One was a carpenter, one was an electrician, one was a plumber and one was a bookkeeper. What they were was what they did. None was ever called a technician.

    "Well," I said, "that's fine, but could we schedule it for next week (it was 7:00 Friday morning when I made the call). How about Tuesday."

     So Tuesday between 8:00 and 10:00 AM was when it would be, assuming the drip didn't turn back to a flood despite the turned-off shut off valves. If those shut-off valves were to fail altogether we would have to shut down the entire system and no one wants to go days with no flowing water in the house. Been there, done that and don't want to go back.

    But why are we waiting if the plumb...sorry, technician could come this very day?

    Because the Little Woman (which is probably the wrong euphemism for someone five foot ten inches tall) wanted to replace the old vanity in the bathroom. It seemed better to do it when the plumb...technician came to replace the faucet than have a second visit later. I mean, plumb...technicians never say, "Oh don't worry about a second call, we don't charge for that." We can use the weekend to go shop both a new vanity and new faucet.

    Naturally the young lady on the phone offered to have the plumb...technician bring their catalogue with him as a nice convenience to us, but you know that convenience would have a price. I'm sure they have nice stuff, but we're bargain basement people I fear and their catalogue items are probably a few floors higher.

      Saturday morning we are off to the home supply stores.

     We had barely gotten up the road,when it dawned on me I had forgotten to do any measuring. I meant to and didn't, which happens a lot being an old guy. We do a U-turn (legal in Delaware) and go back hope and I measure. I don't want the plumber coming and saying this thing won't fit.  It's measure or regret, I alway say.

      First off, we have a tiny bathroom. There is space for a tub, a toilet, a sink and the person using them.  It is not a designer bath, no place for bidets and double sinks, lounge chairs and makeup desks. It's pretty utilitarian and that's about it. Years ago we installed a vanity. It was twenty inches wide. I screwed a toilet paper holder into one side. The other side was up against the wall.

     Now we finally get to the home supply store, Lowe's.

     There is a number of vanities to look at and select, but there is not one that comes as small as twenty inches wide. The smallest in any shape, style or stature is 24 inches.

     We can do it. Twenty-four inches will fit. Anything bigger and when you go to sit on the toilet you'll be sitting in the sink, but 24 will fit.

     The price tag on most of the displayed items won't fit though. Not just the price of the vanities, but with most you also have to buy a sink separately.  But there is one my wife likes and the cost isn't bad and it includes the sink. It seems ideal, except it is "special ordered" with a two-week wait until delivery.

    The plumb...technician is scheduled in three days.

    And about this time a salesman ambles up to us. He says the wrong thing.

     "We just upgraded our whole selection. We got rid of all the low-end product. You'll find everything nicely upscaled now, no more of the more shoddy items."

      My wife thought that was plum crazy (or is it "tech crazy" now). We are not upscale people. Oh no, when it comes to scales we're on the down-low. There are a lot of people like us who can't go upscale. Call us shoddy or not, why would a big box store do away with the low end customer, especially in this economy?

     Next stop, Home Depot.

     There was a bit less selection, but they still had "shoddy" along with the upscale, nothing less than 24 inches wide, though. Lo and behold, my wife did find a vanity, a darker wood than our old, which came complete with a white sink at a sale price. She liked it because it had two drawers on one side, not just a big hollow opening inside.

     Right across the aisle were some nice looking faucets just the right size for this vanity.

     We had our new vanity and faucet, we hauled them home and now it was just wait for the plumb...technician to come on Tuesday morning and  snap everything into place. What could possibly go wrong now?



  

Water Flows Directly Through My Wallet

About 8:00 Tuesday morning the phone rings. It is a young lady telling me the technician is on his way. He arrived ten minutes later. This is a nice change. Usually when given those between 8:00 and 10:00 windows one is pacing back and forth at four minutes to ten wondering if they will make it when the phone rings to say the last job took longer than expected. That didn't happen this time, must be a good omen.

I went to the door and this kid is standing there. I have noticed since reaching my present age that all the maintenance people who come to service something are kids.

But he is pleasant enough. He slips these booties over his shoes and comes in to see what is to be done.

Well, of course there is that unstoppable faucet in the bathroom and the new vanity, sink and hardware to be installed. There is also a faucet on the outside front of the house that has been dripping for the last eight months or so. My wife figured we should get that replaced as well. And there is the bathtub faucet that seems to be developing its own slow drip. I figure the tub could use a new shower head, too.

He takes a look at the tub faucet. It is a Delta. He doesn't take kindly to the Delta. "It's a good faucet," he says, "but the design is terrible."

He explains how it has three little pipes that connect inside. There is a giant nut behind the knob. The danger is with the faucet having some age now that when the nut is turned it will twist and break the pipes. Then you have a bigger repair.

He examines the sink faucet and agrees it is shot.

We walk outside and look at the leaky faucet.

So after this little tour we go to the kitchen and he begins flipping pages in a book. All jobs are priced up front, no hourly rates, no guesswork. So he tells me the costs and one thing is immediately clear, the tub can wait until another day or a worse leak. Not only is he nervous about snapping pipes removing the Delta, the quote to replace it with a Moan and replace the shower and all is a bit steep for me right now.

We sign the agreements, which includes a three-day change your mind agreement like they always give you when you borrow money or get a mortgage. Seems kind of silly, although with what plumbing work costs maybe one does need a mortgage.  Still, he is going to do the work right now, this instant before the ink dries so what happens if I change my mind in the next three days? Do they come back and unrepair the repairs?

"We'll start with the bathroom sink," he says.

He goes into the hall and looks the vanity over. He is making hmmm-hmmm sounds. I never like to hear hmmm-hmmm sounds coming from the throat of anyone doing work for me. They're not a cat, they're not purring. (I don't think they are purring. Perhaps considering how much I will be paying them, they are purring.)

Here is the reason for the hmmm-hmmms. Our old vanity, the one being replaced, is 20 inches wide. This new model, with the two drawers down the right side that my wife likes so much, is 24 and with the new sink added will be 25 inches wide.  He is concerned the drain pipe will not line up, especially with the drawers taking up half the space.

Oh, boy, I did all this measurement to make sure the thing would fit in our small bath, but never considered the drain pipe perplexity. I had considered the water feed lines lining up given the four inch differential, but having looked in the old vanity and seen those feed lines had flexible pipe I figured it didn't matter. I didn't think the drain would be somehow a different matter.

He does some measuring and then says he may have to cut some off of the drawers, is that all right. Yeah, fine, I don't care cause I don't want to take this thing back and reschedule. (As it turned out he didn't have to cut. He got everything fitted in nicely, if tightly.)

We dodged that bullet and he installed the vanity and sink.

Now we are left with replacing the outside drippy faucet. This should be a piece of cake, I thought. Ha, what a fool I am.

First was the matter of how this would be accomplished. In my naivete I thought the faucet would simply twist off the pipe similar to unscrewing a lightbulb, except maybe with some cutting and soldering involved. Well, cutting and soldering probably was involved, but the faucet could not be removed and replaced from the outside of the house. The pipe had to be worked from the interior of the home.

Second we had to locate this interior pipe. When they built this house they did not make such things as pipe easily accessible. Every time I ever had to get plumping done it resulted in cutting holes in walls or ceilings. This was no different. The pipe ran between walls and would have to be reached by cutting a hole in the back of the entryway closet.

"We don't patch drywall," says the technician.

Yeah, I know, I've heard that several times. Why plumbers are so handy doing a lot of more complicated stuff, but can't patch walls and ceilings they chop up I do not know. It must be a union thing.

Third, he asks where the shut off valve is. Ha, there's the rub. If there was a shut off valve and I knew where it was, that faucet wouldn't have dripped for eight months.  Everything else in the place has a shutoff valve. The sinks do. The outside faucet in the rear of the house has one right in the laundry room above the shut off valve for the water heater. It is a big red lever. You can't miss it.

We begin a search, but as stated, everything is behind walls and ceilings.  We can't even be sure how this pipe meanders about. We get a flashlight and enter the storage shed downstairs, which runs back under the stairs. This is a dark, sometimes low, full of stuff, little room where the main shut off valve is. We search. He sees the pipe that has to be that outside faucet running into the main system, but doesn't spot any shut off valve. So the whole system has to be shut down.

Now it is time for action. There should be nothing more standing in the way, right?