Running Water

I love running water. If I had to live without some of our common luxuries I would go without electricity and telephone before I would give up running water. Maybe that is because there have been times in my life when our running water did not work so well, and I have grown to deeply appreciate it. One of those times happened on Tuesday. Dad went to Omaha for massage clinicals and to pick up the kids from the airport leaving Trina, Leah and myself home for the day. No big deal, we had stuff to do and were enjoying our last quiet day. First thing I started cleaning up the canning stuff left over from the peach jam, including dumping the old canner water down the drain. I came back a few minutes later and it was still in the sink. Strange. I noticed the other side of the sink also had water in it. Hmmm... sometimes they do this airlock thing to each other, maybe I just needed to get a little air going on. Plunging the sink usually does the trick in this situation, so I went to fetch the plunger. On my way I noticed the bathtub in the old bathroom also had water in it. Wow, it must be the day for plugged up drains!

Sure enough, plunging did the trick, although it took alot of work. I literally felt like I was plunging all the water down, not just letting in some air. Oh well, at least that is taken care of. I plunged on the tub a little too, without as much success. I decided to come back to it later, a little water in the tub is no emergency. I finished the dishes and walked past the tub again. Now there is more water in it. Those girls, why didn't they notice it was not draining before they used it!! Some people....
Oddly, those girls had not used the tub. And the water in the tub strangely resembled the stuff that just went down the sink. Hmmm... Sure enough, the tests confirmed what was slowing dawning on my slow little mind. We had running water still, it just was running right down the sink and up the bathtub. It is a big tub but sooner or later... Trina bailed out the tub and we called Dad. He said he knew how to fix it, but he was not going to tell us over the phone (much to my relief) and to just avoid using it as much as possible. We soon discovered that it is easier to bail out the tub every once in a while than use the bathroom sink for everything.
When Benjamin came home, we all gave him big hugs and told him how much we missed him, and took him directly to the plugged drain. He is really quite the handyman. I am not sure what he did, but he started in straight away.
I guess the problem was actually somewhere in the basement. Trina assisted and ended up with a first hand look at what was clogging the drain. Or rather, she did not get out of the way fast enough when it all came out of the pipe... From this picture I would wager to guess a lot of it did not make it into the bucket.

Benjamin fixed the pipe and got it all put back together for us before lunch time. I love having a handyman around!! Oh, and he said there was, well, alot of hair and canning junk and other stuff that was causing the problem. I did not post a picture of it just in case anyone reads my blog on their lunch break...