On Saturday evening, after supper, it was nice enough for us to take the rest of our wine and sit in the driveway while we enjoyed the spring-like weather. Yesterday morning it was 35° and we ran the fireplace last night. Hopefully for the last time this season. It’s back up to nearly 70 today and the daytime highs will be in the eighties again by the end of the week. The plants are so confused. To bloom or not to bloom?
Here’s my public service announcement for 2019: never pour dried potato flakes down your sink drain. We were preparing our grocery list on Sunday afternoon when we noticed we had a box of long-expired potato flakes. We don’t use them often, which explains the 2017 expiration date. I like to recycle what I can, so rather than just throw the box away, I decided to empty it in the sink and wash the contents down the drain through the in-sink garbage disposal.
It’s a double sink, and water soon started coming up and out of the drain in the second sink. That’s not good, I thought. I ran the garbage disposal more, but the water kept rising. Eventually I took the trap out of the drain and found it absolutely packed with potato flakes. Packed solid. What’s worse, the pipe extending from the trap into the wall was also stuffed full of the stuff.
It took us a while to find our plumbing snake, something I haven’t had to use in maybe 20 years, but we spent some time snaking out the drain. Every time we stuck it in, it came out with more of those packed potato flakes, which no longer looked at all appetizing because they had old drain goop all over them, too. We got the snake into the drain as far as it would go, and I actually felt like I broke through the last of the clog.
No joy in Mudville.
We tried Drano, baking soda and vinegar and liquid drain cleaner. No luck, and each time I had to drain increasingly noxious fluids out of the trap.
We poured boiling water down the sink and let it sit. (I looked up the problem on the internet and discovered I wasn’t the only person to ever make this huge mistake. I found a long thread of people suggesting fixes, including one wag who suggested adding the right proportions of milk, butter and water to prepare the finished product.)
Ultimately, we had to call a plumber the next day. He arrived with a Tool-man Tim Taylor-level snake (“more power!”) and ended up running it something like 50 feet through the drain to make sure it was clear. Fortunately the kitchen sink is at the far end of the house from the main water inlet and outlet, so none of the rest of our water-producing appliances were affected.
What’s life without a little adventure?
April is poetry month, so here’s a link to the essay I wrote about Stephen King’s relationship to poetry, which I wrote for the Poetry Foundation last year.
I finished Babylon Berlin on Netflix. What a great series, and I’m glad to hear there will be a new season coming in the fall. It has shades of Hitchcock (an assassination plan that’s right out of The Man Who Knew Too Much) and a train full of gold that’s the best McGuffin since the Maltese falcon. It’s set in 1929, during the Wiemar Republic in Germany when factions are trying to remilitarize in opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. Berlin is decadent and dangerous and lively. There’s a sequence in about episode 11 that would have made a great addition to Flight or Fright!
