I laid my weary bones down on the bed at the end of my day and found one of our cats was on the bed too. She’d obviously been outside just a short while before. It had been raining all evening and when I reached out to give her head a goodnight pat I found her to be pretty wet.
I noticed that she didn’t smell like a dog.
That should have been obvious – after all she is a cat and why should I have expected her to smell like a dog?
What I mean though – have you ever noticed when a dog gets wet they pretty much stink. But cats don’t smell bad when they get wet.
Another thing. Dogs are way more likely than cats to enjoy a good swim on a hot day.
Cats will usually fight to defend their desire to stay dry.
What’s wrong with that picture anyhow? In a well-ordered universe you’d think the animal that stunk when wet would be the one that would avoid the water, instead it’s the other way around.
Another thing I’d change if I’d designed everything would be to turn people’s feet around. That way they wouldn’t risk dropping stuff on their toes.
***
The blasted drain on the kitchen sink got clogged up again the other day.
It’s usually a pretty simple fix.
The way our plumbing in the house was laid out is the cause of the problem here.
The drainpipe from the bathtub to the larger pipe leading out to the sewer line must go under a support beam and that pretty much determines the slope of that part of the drainpipe.
This house and plumbing are not new and the outflow pipe they used when it was built would require a well-equipped plumber who knew what he was doing to modify to get a better slope.
News flash for Special K: I am not a well-equipped plumber who knows what he is doing.
To work around this problem we just avoid letting any grease go down the kitchen drain. While the pipe leading away from the kitchen sink has a good angle of slope, when it joins the tub to sewer pipe that grease and other slow moving stuff just sits there and forms a clog.
But I’ve got this nifty little nozzle gizmo that I attach to the garden hose. After opening the clogged line at a P-trap on the tub I shove it into the pipe and turn on the water. The outside of the nozzle swells up and creates a seal that prevents any water from flowing back out the open end of the pipe while the water pressure builds up and pushes whatever is clogging the line right on through the sewer.
This system works well. Most of the time that is.
The pipe was pretty badly clogged this time though. I thought I had it clear at one point – I knew the line from the bathtub was clear. But when the kitchen line sent another grease ball down it just clogged the tub drainpipe again with the result that the bathtub is where the kitchen water wound up.
I’d never seen it so badly clogged before.
Special K finally confessed though. When she’d been cooking dinner the night before she’d had a container sitting in the sink that she’d pour the grease into and she hadn’t noticed it had tipped over and the whole thing ran down the drain.
It’s so nice to have a man around the house.