vituperation

…continued

On that note, I shut the door and trudged around to the front of the store.

Because it was so late—nearly noon—the morning crowd of old men had cleared out. The only one there was the shopkeeper and a lone man back at the “deli” (I use the word very loosely) getting a sandwich.

“Whatchew doin’, boy?” the shopkeeper asked with a grin. I try to stop by the store pretty regularly for little things, just to be seen and considered part of the community. Best I can tell, I’m being accepted.

Probably for comic relief.

“Trying to fix a bathroom problem,” I said. “You know anybody around here who’s good with plumbing and wants to make a little extra money?”

“I b’lieve Alvin does some plumbing work. Mostly electrical, but I think he does some plumbing.”

He turned to the back of the store and cawed Alvin’s name.

-

“Man up here needs to see you,” he said, after Alvin responded.

We made small talk while Alvin finished getting his sandwich and shuffled down over to the cooler for a drink. How much we have left to do on the house, when we’re planning to move, things like that. The shopkeeper’s wife was very interested in how our floors had turned out. Alvin joined us and set his wax paper wrapped sandwich and a container of milk on the counter.

I introduced myself and explained the situation with the bathtub. The old men seemed to get a kick out of my descriptions of water spraying everywhere and my race to get under the house to shut the water off.

“It always takes me once to learn my lesson,” I said. “But once is all it takes.”

Alvin allowed that he mostly did electrical, but had also done plumbing from time to time when needed. He thought he could fix something simple like a faucet that wouldn’t shut off.

“Give me a little while to eat, and I’ll mosey on up and take a look at ‘er,” he said.

About fifteen minutes later he pulled into the driveway. It took him all of about five minutes to fix the problem. When the valve had blown out, one of the things that blew with it was a tiny spring that was laying in the dirty water in the tub. I never saw it.

“I didn’t know there was supposed to be a spring in there,” I said.

“You weren’t supposed to know that,” he said, which made me feel a little better about being such an idiot.

The faucet worked perfectly when the spring was in place. He gave me a lesson on the basics of bathtubs and faucets, and recommended we keep the faucet that was there because it (Delta) was much better than the one (Moen) we’d bought at Lowe’s. He told me several places we could find replacement knobs, and which had the best selection.

When he was done with the faucet and plumbing lesson, he wanted the fifty cent tour of the house. Over the years, he’d done lots of work on the house, mostly for the Nelsons. Miss Pearl, specifically. He’d been under the house plenty of times, and all through the downstairs, but never upstairs. He seemed to enjoy seeing the house, and told me that when he was a boy old man Nelson (who was very short in stature) used to sit out on the front porch all day long and watch people go by.

The stories alone were worth the forty dollars he charged.

-

As it turned out, I needed to go find Alvin the next day, too, because some of our electrical outlets weren’t working. I won’t point fingers here, but I’d like to say that changing the outlets isn’t one of my duties in the Smallville house. I apologized profusely when I found Alvin, but he came down and made them work again. There were loose wires in the back of a couple, which was throwing off the whole circuit.

Another day, another forty dollars. And again, worth every penny.

Then, on Friday, I realized that the upstairs thermostat didn’t appear to be getting any power, so I went Alvin-hunting Saturday morning. A man at the grocery store directed me to Alvin’s house, where he’d seen Alvin’s truck parked when he drove by just a few minutes earlier. I felt like the world’s biggest pest went I rang the doorbell. Alvin assured me I wasn’t being a bother, but that he didn’t know much about air conditioners.

“Do you know anybody around here who does?”

“Sure do. Boy named Rodney Schrimsher over on Ingalls Road works on mine. Does a right good job.”

Back at the house, I looked Rodney up in the phone book and called him. He was willing to come over Sunday morning to look at it and see what he could find. What he found was a life saver: the 50 amp wire to the unit had come loose in the breaker box, and each time we flipped the power off and on for Robyn to work on the outlets and switches it was arcing. Slowly but surely, the plastic around the wire was charring. Finally, the breaker flipped, and that’s why there was no power getting to the thermostat and air conditioning unit.

In my defense, breakers were the first thing I checked. When this one flipped, it didn’t even go halfway so it still looked like it was in the ‘ON’ position. Rodney reconnected the 50 amp wire, and tightened all the other loose wires. He told me that if we’d flipped the breaker back without fixing the wire it would’ve kept charring until something caught on fire.

Cost of preventing a burned down house: $30.

Before Rodney left, I asked him if he knew anyone who’d be willing to install a couple of toilets and vanities for a reasonable price. I won’t lie: I’m ready to be done, tired of working on the bathrooms, and ready to pay someone else to do it. We already hired someone to do the tile for the showers, why not have someone else do the sinks and toilets? My experience putting the first toilet in was a nightmare (turns out the problem was a urethane reinforcement in the wax ring, and it took me about 4 hours—plus having my dad come out—to put it in), and I wasted two hours yesterday trying to put a pedestal sink in the half bath with no luck (though I think I figured the problem out last night while I was in bed).

So yeah, getting tired of the bathrooms, and ready to be done.

Rodney’s father-in-law works as a handyman, and does good work for a fair price, according to Rodney. I reckon I might be giving him a call here in the next few days. It seems that in a small town, someone always knows someone who can do most anything you need done.

And that’s pretty cool.

The high point of the weekend was the 90 minutes I spent breaking ground for our garden. I tilled it twice, once longways and once crossways. Let me just say that the tiller on the tractor kicks ass. Below are a couple of pictures of the finished product. What’s amazing to me is that this was sod when I started, and the tiller just chewed right through it without a hitch.

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It’s about 75 feet by 100 feet. I have big plans for this space.

The original plan was to have a small garden, maybe 20×40, with good southern staples: corn, okra, tomatoes, green beans, and some melons. Then I called my wife to ask her if she had anything to add to the seed list.

Our list has changed somewhat.

Now, we’re growing (or perhaps I should say trying to grow) :

Regular tomatoes, cherry tomatoes (2 kinds), cabbage, romaine, spinach, cukes, watermelons, cantaloupes, okra, blackeyed peas, pole green beans, sweet corn, popcorn, sunflowers, brussels sprouts, green peppers, jalapenos, sugar snap peas, yellow squash, white squash, and collards.

All those seeds (enough for this year and next, if not longer) were less than $50. That’s pretty awesome.

I suspect I’ll be a busy boy soon.