Yesterday was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I should have been doing some seasonal yard clean-up, or riding my bike or napping. Instead, I was standing at the hardware store checkout counter, covered in cobwebs and spattered with black slime. In my cart: three gallons of Drano, a drain auger, a plunger, and a wet/dry vac. The check-out clerk said, "How's your day going?". "Fine", I said.
Yes, we had a "situation" at our house - a situation involving an unstable spaghetti strainer and an entire pot of angel hair pasta sliding down the drain and then locking up a pipe in the basement as surely as if we'd poured Gorilla Glue down the sink.
When one considers the plumbing in their home, one thinks, "it's just pipes and gravity. I can fix this". And then one ends up, a couple of hours later, covered in the afore-mentioned cobwebs and black slime, and one reaches a new understanding of why plumbers are trained and licensed professionals.
chris congdon
