Monday, December 14

It came to my attention today that perhaps I am not living up to the expectations of a few of my followers.  It seems that they need more posts showing the exciting life of a retired school teacher.  I could write about my Friday adventure that included putting up my outside Christmas lights or how I solved the case of my smelly bathroom.  The smelly bathroom seems much more interesting and could actually prove to be of some value if indeed you were to have a sewer gas problem in your own bathroom.  I love my son in law and if I have learned one thing from him it would be this, if you need to find an answer you need go no farther than your IPhone.  Google has an answer for everything.  Andy had suggested that perhaps the vent could be stopped up, something I would never have thought of, so I typed in clogged toilet vent and to my amazement up popped a plethora of possibilities for solving such a problem.  After reading my choices, I chose the most common strategy.  It involved climbing on the roof armed with a garden hose.  I also took a plumbers snake as a backup.  Andy was in charge of turning on the water. In theory the weight of the water would flush out any blockage and if that didn't work the snake would loosen the clogs and you could try the water again. The most difficult part was getting the hose into the vent.  The top of the vent was 4" in diameter but about 2 feet down in became a 1 1/2' diameter pipe and my hose seemed to have a natural curl preventing it from hitting the much smaller hole. After another trip down the ladder to get a flashlight, which proved pretty useless, and a yard stick, I was ready to give it another try.  I found it impossible to hold the hose, the yardstick and the flashlight all at once so I abandoned the flashlight and just used the yardstick to try and guide the hose into the smaller hole.  After a minute or so I was successful and we turned the water on and waited for the miracle of unclogging to happen.  There was no magic "whoosh" as described but I was able to get the snake down the entire 15 feet as opposed to the 4 feet it had gone before the garden hose flush.  Mission accomplished and so far we no longer have a smelly bathroom.  I must say that there is proud feeling of accomplishment when we can solve a problem and save a few dollars in the process. That good feeling didn't last too long though because after I put everything away in the barn, the sliding door got hung up and in the process of closing (kicking) it, I slipped and fell on my bumper, as Lily calls it, and hit my elbow. Fixing the d@*n door is next on our to do list.  So now you are probably glad that I don't post my day to day activities, they aren't really that exciting, I am off to Delaware for Luke and Lily's music program on Thursday so look for a more traditional post towards the end of the week.

These are some of  the pics from Sara and Matt's family photo shoot.  They came out super cute!