12/10/07 Y'all are really lucky I had to go do some stuff or you would either be getting A) a rant about how much I hate technology, or 2) nothing at all because I had gone totally Luddite and destroyed another laptop. Suffices to say, the internot connection, laptop, and work computer's printer all fucked up at once. Now Word is fighting me. I'm ok. I'm moving on. Friday afternoon I get a call from mom saying she’s going to dinner with Aunt Margaret. I had spoken to him earlier so I say, “That’s fine, I'll hang out with the contractor while he gets started on the toilets.” Oh, he had spent the entire day searching for the toilets we wanted and finally found them at about 1500 h. I get another call about five minutes later saying, “Come home as quick as you can. The sink in your bathroom has broken and is shooting hot water everywhere.” This was mom saying it, by the way. She got a neighbor to shut off the water to the house but the flood was still significant. I get home and find it raining in the garage and the floor soaked upstairs. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had limited itself to the bathroom, but it shot under the wall into my closet and soaked a section of my room as well. The contractor finally shows up and we all decide it isn't worth trying to dry the forty year old carpet. They need to be replaced. We rip up the bathroom’s carpet, half the hall’s carpet, and a big section in my room including half the closet. We further decide that the sink is shot as well as the faucet so the plan for Saturday is to replace all the plumbing. Saturday morning he comes back then he and I head for Sutherland’s to buy a sink and faucet. I pick out something nice and basic which we buy. We know we’ll be back for more so we limit that trip to basic hardware. Back at the house we, and I do mean the contractor by himself, put the sink and faucet together. We, again him alone, take it up for a test fit. It’s nice. Back in the garage we have a look at the water inlet pipes. We head back to Sutherland’s. We check a set of hoses against another faucet and decide on them. They were wrong. We go back and find the “right” hoses. Well, they were right on one end. The contractor, henceforth to be known as Mario, which may or may not be his real name, doesn’t want to go back to Sutherland’s. We go to Lowe’s/Home Depot instead. I used the slash because we weren’t sure where we’d wind up. We made a detour by a music store so Mario could buy some ukulele strings or patch cords or a Theremin or something then wound up at Home Depot. We finally found the hoses we needed and bought them. Back at the house they were installed on the sink and then the sink in the cabinet. Of course now the half of the “P” trap attached to the sink doesn’t line up with the half sticking out of the wall. When that is removed, we find that the old stuff isn't made to the modern standard and nothing fits. We fight it for the rest of the day. We make three more trips to Sutherland’s and basically hemorrhage money. By the end of the day we still don’t have the drain working. Mario leaves and I agree to drop mom off at a party then pick her up later. I drop her off and head for the shop to look at the Birkini top on the Seven. See, when test driving it the other day I found that the wind would billow it up causing the support rods to fall out of their mounts in the roll hoop. I play with some straps to hold it back towards the roll hoop but none were successful. I am just about to lock the door to go get mom when she calls. I tell her I'm fifteen minutes away and roll out to get her. I arrive twenty minutes later and pick her up. My sister was catering the event and gave me some bread pudding. It was tasty. Sunday my plan is to hang out and help Mario finish the sink and then we’ll get started on the toilets. Around 1230 h mom comes home from church and asks if I'd heard from him. I hadn’t and said he'd call before heading over if we want to go grab some lunch. She’s got a dinner that evening and had a snack at the church so she fixes me a sammich and goes to take a nap. Around 1500 h I hear from Mario that he’s spoken to some plumbing experts and now knows exactly what he needs. Unfortunately, he can’t get it until Monday morning. I decide to go to the shop. Gregg calls and wants to hang out at the shop with me so we meet there. I take Fifi because I think it has more gas than Matilda. It doesn’t. I stop for gas and freeze my ears off while pumping it. I decide to stop at Tractor Supply for some straps for the Birkini top and a tuque, eh. “What’s a tuque?” you ask? Well, apparently you are either not Canadian or never heard/saw Bob & Doug McKinzey’s “Great White North” bit from SCTV, eh. Look here, eh: tuque . Anyhoo, after pumping the gas in Fifi, I drove all the way to Tractor Supply saying, “Aw geez! I'm such a hoser. I really need to get me a tuque, eh,” in my finest Canadian accent, eh. I even walked in and asked the girl at the counter, “Hey, where you keep the tuques, eh?” She stared at me like I was from, well, Canada. Actually, I just wandered around mumbling in Canadian until I found the tuques. When I finally found them I grabbed one I “liked” and went looking for straps. I found a pair of straps I “liked” and headed for the counter. I paid up, popped the tuque on my head, and headed for the shop. Once there I played with the straps until Gregg arrived. We had a look and he suggested welding some bungs over the holes in the roll hoop’s mounting plates then pinning the top’s bars into them. I liked that plan except for the fact that I'd have to remove the hoop to weld it. I was not about to weld on the car so close to so many flammable things including the gas tank and overflow! We had a look around for some suitable round stock and finally headed for Lowe’s. I bought a bit of pipe that just almost fit over the aluminum rod and we headed back. After some cutting, trimming, and drilling, the bungs were ready to zook. I drilled some holes to get a wrench in to remove the roll hoop and then we fought that for a while. Finally the hoop was off and I took it to the table to weld. Did I take the time to clean off the paint? Of course not. Did the welds go smoothly in spite of that? Of course not. Are the welds acceptable? Well, they’ll hold but they aren’t the prettiest things out there. When the hoop was cool enough to test fit the roof bow, we slipped it back in and I drilled them for the pins. Oh, I also bought a pair of “R” clips while at Lowe’s. I installed the pins and we took the roll hoop back to the car. We dropped it in place and tried the top again. The new bungs held the top in a much better location relative to my head and would not come out until the pins were removed. We declared it “done enough for now” and went home. And that is what happened to me over the weekend. Well, I think I'm just about talked out for today so I'll just leave you with this: All I said was, “Canadian beer sucks!” Eh.