[294/365] enthalpic life

[cosmolinguist]

On our way back from B&M with the sealant we were going to use in hopes of sorta stopping a leak and sorta gluing some things together in a way that should've been more watertight than its current design, I was talking about something a friend had just said: "I hate chores that just get you back to baseline..."

Now that I'm back home, I can get the quote right:

I spent 10 minutes taking apart a lamp where the pull chain broke, reattaching the chain with jewelry pliers, and putting it back together. So now I have a normal working lamp, which is what I had yesterday until the chain broke

I read this while I was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet next to our bathtub, keeping an eye on whichever of two little black plastic buckets was slowly filling up with water from the shower head and transferring said shower head to the other, empty bowl while I dumped out the water from that one in the sink.

I was doing this because our shower has long had a leak, which was recently investigated by a plumber who declared it would cost thousands to fix so we're just resigned to having a leaky shower head.

But yesterday when mother_bones was using the shower, water dribbled into the kitchen from the ceiling.

After my gym session this morning -- which was great, by the way! My seemingly-impossible series of access needs seemed to have its best chance of being met here.

I tried not to get my hopes up too high but they were absolutely met. The hour flew by, and the two problems I had with it have both been resolved already! diffrentcolours was kind enough to drive me today but I wasn't sure I could bring him to the session with me because I wasn't sure how trans-specific it wwwso he sat today out, and also I didn't know if I could get there by public transport on days when he wasn't available to take me. It turns out I can sneak D in, and the place is right next to a tram stop! The journey takes a while by public transport from here, but it's not difficult or particularly stressful, so it's really nice to have that option.

So anyway once I was done with an hour of weights I wanted a shower. D said he wanted to watch. He was hoping he could tell if there was an obvious leak or something we could fix without having to get a plumber to do it. He put on his nitrile gloves and crawled around on the floor while I quickly washed the sweat off my skin. It was enough for him to identify a leak.

The rest of the day has gone pretty much like DIY adventures always do; multiple trips to hardware stores, getting dirty and doing gross stuff (poor boy, he's got by far the most sensitive stomach for this sort of thing in the household, but he said he also had the only arms long enough to reach what needed to be reached), collecting tools from the shed and random items from the house, and...yeah, me sitting there waiting for buckets to fill so I could empty them.

Because a defective bit of plumbing ("1½ inch shallow bath trap") had to be removed and taken to the store in hopes of finding a match, that meant all the water from the leaking shower would go right through to the kitchen ceiling. So MB collected a couple of buckets and I sat in the bathroom emptying one or the other every several minutes (D didn't want to turn off the water entirely because that would also turn off the heating which MB relies upon this time of year as her illnesses mean she can get very cold very quickly). I didn't mind doing it -- I was listening to an interview with Mike Veeck about the documentary about him which I've heard good things about from other Minnesotans (it's mostly about his time with the St. Paul Saints) and playing with the dog when he came to try to figure out what on earth was going on with his humans today. This kind of disruption can make him reactive sometimes, but he was such a good boy today, I'm so proud of him. And I was amused to see, when poor D had to lie on the floor with half his body blocking the hallway, Gary would carefully pick a path around D's legs, in a way that reminded me of how people gingerly pass a big tree that's mostly blocked a road or something, and another time I saw him cheerfully appear as soon as D happened to shift his legs for his own reasons; clearly Gary had assessed that there was no path for him that time and had just waited for D to move in the way people have to wait for long freight trains at level crossings.

Anyway, having told D about my friend and her lamp on the way back from the second store visit this evening, I tried to briefly describe the conversation it kicked off: I compared it to laundry, which I usually try to do whenever I've accumulated enough for a loadful but today is Day 2 of dealing with Laundry Mountain and I'm still not done yet (annoyingly, some of my sweaty clothes from the gym got neglected in the load I did once I was back home today!).

I'd just been musing earlier as I began today's attack on the laundry, on the fact that even when I'm doing laundry I'm still wearing clothes that are getting dirtier even as I stop to think about this! Someone else said they felt similarly about dishes. Others compared it to less frequent but no less frustrating things like breaking a glass with your drink in it and ending up with a chore and still having to get another drink, or having to fix the wifi. I told my friend about having read her complaint while sitting in the bathroom doing a dull intermittent chore that might end up meaning I can take a shower tomorrow. I've taken so many showers for granted!

When I told D all this, he said "That's the problem with leading such enthalpic lives." He had to define it for me: he said the opposite of entropy. We want to live our lives in highly ordered states: with access to water, electricity, comfortable temperatures, lamps we can just turn on, wifi that works... Rare chores like fixing a lamp or trying to keep the water where it belongs in a house can be so stressful! Cyclical chores can be so unsatisfying!

We're using the sealant in, uh, an unorthodox way, but if it works once it has cured tomorrow, I will be very appreciative of my next shower.

Comments

[silveradept]

The struggle against entropy is real, and when you have an entire household that sometimes adds up to one functional human, it can be tricky to win those battles.

Here's hoping the leak gets fixed and the showers are possible again.

[sfred]

I hope the anti-leak work worked.

Glad to hear that the gym was good, too.