That Sinking Feeling

Our kitchen sink faucet gave up the ghost the other day.  It started with a tiny drip, and grew from there into an annoying drip, the kind that shows up unannounced and hits the stainless steel sink with an audible thud that my wife can hear from the next county, or in her sleep.  It’s almost as bad as when I forget to turn off the air compressor in the attached garage, and it comes on with a basso profundo bray around 3 AM, and I get the elbow in response.

So I went down to McLendon’s, first, as usual, and bought two complete new cartridges, since I wasn’t quite sure which one was the leaker, brought them home and installed them.  That’s when I realized that I could have just bought a seal kit for one third the price. Ah, well.  The leak did not stop.  Consternation ensued.

The decision was made to toss the old one and buy a brand new faucet, the kind with the graceful swiveling neck like a swan with a funnel for a beak and a handle on each side, and a spray nozzle in its own socket over on the right.  There was nothing wrong with our spray nozzle, other than a minor tendency for the thumb lever to detach itself without warning, but a new one was part of the kit, so there you go.

I assured my wife that, despite my retired status, my assembly skills were still sharp as a tack, then shooed her off to work while I contemplated the Rosetta Stone instructions, which taught me everything I needed to know in three languages.

The hardest part was getting down under the sink and working overhead on my back in a tight space.  This would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, if I had not been attending yoga classes at Michelle Peterson’s Aspiration Community Yoga for the last few years.  The second hardest part was pulling all the stuff out from under there.  I got my son-in-law to hold everything steady while I tightened the nuts on the stems underneath and attached the hoses where they went.  Piece of cake, really.

Then, when I got up to test run the new faucet, I noticed a strange thing.  The two handles were reversed.  When I would reach for the cold tap, for example, it opened with a counter-clockwise push, rather than the pull I expected.  The same thing happened on the hot side!  Very interesting.  Must be a new design feature, I decided.  All the package said was that the spout swiveled 360 degrees, but not a word about opening the valves.

Anyway, I checked for leaks underneath and declared it good.  I decided I rather liked the new configuration, and hoped she would as well.  I announced the completion in a text and got on the next project, out in the shop.

My hopes were impetuous, as it turned out, along with my logic.  The first words out of her mouth were, “Why did you put it in backwards?  Look, the handles have a C and an H on them, and the C is on the left!”

“In the first place,” I replied, thinking fast, “You have to think outside the box here.  See this instruction book?”  I held it up.  “It is in three languages, one of which is French.  That C could also be for Chaud, which means Hot in French, does it not?  And the H could also mean Hrim, with is an Old Norse word in the Norman dialect for “Cold as the Icy Heart of a Landlord at the end of the month, could it not?”  She elevated an eyebrow.  “And furthermore”, I continued, “those letters are on little caps that can easily be transferred to the opposite sides if you insist.  But why not try it for a while?  I like the fact that while I’m rinsing dishes they don’t have a tendency to knock into the valve handle and turn the water cold this way.  But I’m willing to agree, for the sake of harmony, that, on the face of it, a good case could be made that I did indeed install the faucet backwards.  I assure you that that was not fully in my mind at the time, and I would be happy to put it back the other way, but first, why don’t you try it for a few days and see what you think?”  She grudgingly assented.  “Yes, Dear” and “Ok, Fine” work both ways.  Besides, I do all the dishes.

So I think I may have skated on this one.  My only concern is that she might decide that all the other sinks in the house should be reversed, for consistency, but I’ll deal with that if and when it happens.  It looks like the sprayer is powerful enough that I can mostly hit the dogs’ water dish on the floor next to the fridge without having to pick up the full dish out of the sink and place it on the floor and not spill too much, so that’s a bonus.  Kitchen innovation is a never-ending opportunity, I tell you.  :-{)}

Travels with Dog, pt. 2

I think I have a new favorite road, now.  As usual with these sorts of things, an accidental happenstance leads to a discovery.  When you are on the road for whatever reason, you are also on an adventure, and should be open to new experiences when they present themselves.

In this case, we were on our way home with the dog, Nash, or Fuzzbutt, as I call him, from the National Specialty show for the Bouvier des Flandres breed, held this year in a suburb of St. Louis at a facility owned by Purina Farms, maker of Dog Chow and so much else.  The factory resembled the place where Soylent Green was made, to me, but the show facilities were top-notch, even air conditioned, a rarity in the Dog Show world where local fairgrounds are the most common venues and rustic is the most common description. It turned out we were right close to Route 66, the Mother Road, and I spent some time retracing its path as I explored the neighborhood.

We were running a day late because we had gotten caught on the east side of the Continental Divide when a big storm blew down from Canada and blanketed the Great Plains with an unseasonal early snow from Alberta to northern Texas and I-70 was shut down for miles west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, forcing us to wait it out in a Hotel in Kearny, Nebraska.  This was far from the worst case scenario, given that the Seahawks were on the tube in London and the local beer was fresh and good.  We seem to have finally arrived at the way things were back before Prohibition was enacted, with small breweries in every town making great beer for the locals, and travelers lucky enough to find them on their way through.

We finally got back on the road on Tuesday morning in sub-freezing weather, but clear skies and dry pavement supported the decision, and we made good time after that.  Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and most of their neighbors have a 75 or 80 mph speed limit on their freeways, which helps gobble up the miles.

On the morning of the last day we woke up early in our hotel in Evanston, Wyoming and beat feet out of town in the shivering darkness on Interstate 84.  I have found that when you hit the road early and wait a while before breakfast, it tastes extra good when you finally find it, as if your body is celebrating the realization that you weren’t actually trying to starve it to death after all.

We blew through the last of Wyoming and a good chunk of northeastern Utah before we stopped for lunch in the very cool small town of Baker City, Oregon.  This is an old Western town (1874, with movie-set buildings to back it up) tucked into a valley where the burnt scrubland hills of Eastern Oregon give way to trees and sheltered dales with cultivated fields and small-town cafes like the Oregon Trail, where we sat at a booth and relearned that banana cream pie is a universal language.  Okay, okay, I will stipulate any kind of pie, but banana cream is the one for me.

Of course, after lunch my wife had to get the dog out for a walk before we left, which caused all of the servers  and at least one customer to abandon their posts for a look-see.  A purebred Bouvier in full show trim is a rare thing in these parts, apparently.  You have to admire their innocence.

We finally got back on the road and drove through town admiring the architecture and the old houses, only to discover that the onramp to Interstate 84 was closed and locked with a padlocked gate!  There were no signs, and nobody standing around explaining matters as a steady stream of cars and trucks were detoured back through town to state highway 30, which at that point had become a parking lot.  We skipped back to the original offramp we had taken to get in, only to find it also locked down!  The busy freeway was as empty as a politician’s heart at tax time.

In the old days I would routinely stop at a hardware store in these small towns and buy a Metsker Map of the county, which always had all the back roads, paved and unpaved, on it, a useful source of information and a pleasure to read later and mark the roads you had taken while setting aside others for next time.  Nowadays, I just pulled out my phone and hit the Google Maps button.  It seemed to show me that State Highway 203, otherwise known as the Medical Springs Highway, which started right at one of those closed-off onramps and seemed to head straight into the surrounding hills in the wrong direction altogether, actually wandered about through those hills and came back down to 84 some 35 miles down the road, which should have bypassed whatever problem was happening on the freeway.  So that’s the way we went, up into the hills in search of another way home.  What we found was delightful.

As we later learned from an Oregon Department of Transportation tweet, “I-84 closed in both directions between #LaGrande & #BakerCity due to a roll over crash involving a semi tractor-trailer hauling cattle. ODOT attempting to round up cattle. No detour at this time. Extensive closure possible.”  Some poor cowboy bought the farm out there, along with several of the cows he was hauling to market, while we were having our lunch.  The rest of them wandered the freeway until people arrived to round them up again.  I hope a few of them escaped to live an outlaw life hiding in the canyons and gorges that populate that country.  If they only knew where they were headed, they would have all run for it.

But for us, the closure led us to this old back road that twisted and turned up and down the scrubby hills outside of town for miles, until it picked up and ran alongside Catherine Creek before coming to the town of Union, which is where we picked up I-84 again, well past the chaos caused by the accident.

There is a town called Medical Springs, out there in the middle of nowhere.  Blink twice and you’ll miss it.  It reminds us that, back in the late 1800s, most of our ancestors lived in those small towns scattered all over the West.  Baker City was a pretty big town for the times, and the idea of a Portland or a Seattle or a San Francisco was too much to think about.

The State Park on Catherine Creek was beautiful, and empty on that particular day.  Nash got to take a long walk on his leash, out over the bridge to look down at the creek, and wander through the trees.  Here’s some pictures:

Our restful interlude in a beautiful little park out in the country by a creek was the high point of a day spent flogging our new van through parts of four states toward a home that was all the more desirable for the twelve days we had been away.

The best part of any journey is the homecoming.  That, and the little adventures that soothe your soul along the way.  :-{)}