Four Wins

A Friday Hodgepodge

Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner.

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1. One evening, my son came downstairs and told me his sink was full, even though he hadn't been using it.

This was right before bedtime, so I grouchily investigated and found his bathroom sink filled exactly to the brim with cold water. Attempts at unclogging were futile, so I partly bailed the sink out into the toilet. Nobody had been doing anything with water upstairs, so I was puzzled. The only thing I could imagine filling it might be the running dishwasher, which I think pumps water out, but that would be hot and soapy, and I would be amazed if it got upstairs simply because of the amount of pipe it would have to fill on the way, not to mention the sink being higher than the toilet and bathtub in the same bathroom.

The sink wasn't filling (at the moment), but it really bothered me that I couldn't think of how it got full in the first place.

Fortunately for that night's sleep, it finally occurred to me to google the problem, and I learned the following:

In Houston, it's prohibited to have a trapped drain in the attic, so the condensate is usually routed to the closest lavatory drain where it's connected to the lav drain with a branched tailpiece.

The problem is that the condensate is just water pulled out from the ambient air, and so it doesn't carry any disinfectants like chlorine or chloramines. Pretty quickly, whatever chlorinated water was in the trap is long gone and algae begins to grow in the drain. The algae becomes a mesh that catches everything that comes down that drain. Sometimes, we just have to clear some of that goop out of the trap; but usually there's a clog further downline that requires a cable.

Well! That explains everything! I thought, half-correctly.

I finished bailing out the sink, flushed the toilet, turned off the upstairs AC, and told my son to sleep downstairs on the couch.

I unclogged the drain the next day with some Green Gobbler and boiling water.

The drain cleared out ... and then I heard gurgling from behind the wall for a time.

Underneath the sink, there was no connection!

I turned on the AC and cautiously monitored for a time, and I seem to have accidentally unclogged a part of the main sewer line downstream of where the condensate line and that sink empty, at least according to my AC repairman.

And so it is that my son probably saved us from a nice bit of flooding, and I now turn off the upstairs AC any time we are out of town.

During the week, I found a thread on "the most surreal villages on Earth." This photo is from the Marpissa, Greece, first town in the list. (Image by Rasmus Andersen, via Unsplash, license.)

2. After a recent restaurant meal, the kids asked for mashed potatoes as a side for dinner.

Lacking a recipe and hating the instant stuff, I remembered thinking that the topping of my shepherd's pie recipe might work.

It does well enough, but needs tweaking. According to my daughter, it could use butter, which she suggested after saying "I know why the restaurant's mashed potatoes are better than yours!"

3. Faced with a ridiculous amount of small clerical-type tasks and calls, I remembered that an Eisenhower matrix could help.

It did.

And it's indirectly going to make my life easier in other ways, because mine is a fillable PDF form with checkboxes next to each item.

Some time ago, I played with the idea of making my daily planner accessible on my phone through SyncThing. I wanted to not have to carry paper around on days I wouldn't be around my computer much.

A locally-hosted, editable web page with checkboxes seemed ideal until I ran into a small problem: The way the phone is set up makes it easy to either view a web page (but be unable to save it) or edit it in another app (but not be able to view it as if through a browser). That limitation killed the idea for me as too unwieldy.

But the format of the Eisenhower matrix saved the idea: I realized I could probably just export it to a similar type of PDF. There are plenty of PDF reader/editors out there.

It worked for the Eisenhower matrix, and once I get a chance to play with how to make the conversion, I'll have a good portable version of my planner that doesn't involve keeping track of a pen and a piece of paper.

4. Writing a script that needed to know when a virtual machine had stopped running, I needed something like wait, but for something that isn't a child process. Stack Overflow to the rescue!

-- CAV