Starry Night

Today we drove up the Two Rivers to visit with Kris’s birth mother and her husband.  I don’t know if I ever explained that Kris is adopted and years ago (about 19 years ago now) we found her birth mother.  But it is a long story and I won’t go into it.  But after a nice day of visiting with them, it was time to head home.  As we were driving, I happened to look out the window and mention that it was a very starry night.  I forget how many stars there are living in the city and having the light pollution drown out most of them.  I never used to think that we lived in a large town, but we do get all the light pollution from Milwaukee.  It really reminded me of growing up in the Valley.  We didn’t live in the boondocks, but we could at least see the big dipper, North Star and other constellations.  That just doesn’t happen in Menomonee Falls.  I think we need to make a point of getting out of town more often (probably more in the summertime than winter) and just enjoy the night sky. 

Pre-Check Change

Just before Christmas, Kris suggested that we go thru the process of getting TSA pre-check.  When I looked at it and saw that it lasts five years, I thought it was probably a good idea, especially with the travelling I do for work, it would be much more convenient to not have to go thru and take stuff out of my backpack and remove my shoes, etc.

I had looked at it right before Christmas and found out I couldn’t even go get it done until just after the first of the year (I think the 15^th was the earliest appointment we could get).  SO I thought I would wait until after Christmas to schedule it, that way I would have a better idea of our schedules.  Plus, Kris is only off on Wednesdays, so that would be best for her.  I had checked with my boss and she said, go ahead and schedule it and if I had to leave early one day to get it done, that would be fine.  So on December 30^th, about a week after I initially looked at it, I went through registering both of us for our ID/background check.  Now, the soonest I could get in was on Thursday 1/24, and even then there were only three appointments.  Kris said to book them and she would have to work out how to do it with work since we were hoping to get it done before leaving for Florida in a month. 

Then I was talking with my boss earlier this week about it and she said she knows how inconvenient the times are, and that it takes 2-3 weeks to get your pre-check number so having to schedule so far out ahead is just ridiculous.  My thought was, huh?  I thought the 2-3 weeks was the wait time to get in to have it done.  She said, nope, it takes 2-3 weeks AFTER you go in in order to get approved, and the 2-3 weeks to get in to have your check done is just a bonus.  That means that even if we would go in on the 24^th it would still be unlikely we would have our traveler numbers before we left.  After discussing it, we are going to reschedule and push the day out for a Wednesday since it won’t matter.  I ended up doing it the day before we leave for Florida, so I’ll be running around between there and work trying to make sure everything is done before we leave, and Kris will be doing the same with packing.  But if we didn’t do it then, it would be at least another two weeks since right after we get back I have to leave on another trip for work for a few days.  Isn’t the government great?!

Edward Scissorhands Day!

Happy Edward Scissorhands Day!  Oh, you don’t know what Edward Scissorhands Day is?  Well it is the anniversary of my first date with Kris.  On January 4^th of 1992 she came over to the house I was living in near UWM and we watched Edward Scissorhands on a VHS tape that I had rented from Blockbuster. 

For a while the date came and went without fanfare, but a few years ago I started keeping track of it on my calendar.  This year, when I got home from work, I had sat down and it dawned on me I had forgotten to stop and get some flowers (not that they are needed, I just thought it would be nice).  I said, “Oh shoot” out loud and Kris asked what was wrong.  I asked if she knew what day it was, and right away she said it was the anniversary of our first date, and that she had actually mentioned it at work.  The new women she works with all thought it was neat, and sort of weird, that she would remember that.  Anyway, since it was a Friday night and we didn’t have anything else to do, I suggested breaking out the DVD and watching it, but I was shot down.   Kris said, when you think about it, it really isn’t all that great of a movie.  I have to agree.  It is just a little bit bizarre, though what Tim Burton movie isn’t? 

So Happy Edward Scissorhands Day!  It’s hard to believe it has been 26 years. 

Logos

We got an email from Ali's cheer coach today saying that she is going to be ordering Wisconsin Cheer Nationals shirts for all the girls.  Every year, someone (not sure who) designs a shirt that represents all the teams from Wisconsin.  While it is nice, I would rather have one that just refers to our team.  I snapped a picture last year at one of the Disney Parks of a family that had cheer shirts made up for their team that listed the team name, all the girls names, etc. on the back, sort of like a concert t-shirt.  My plan is to make one just like it, but I need to put something on the front.  Since 1) don't want to ask for permisssion to use the "official" Falls logo and 2) I don't want so give the boosters any cash to use any of their designs (not sure if I would need to, plus I don't like the Falls' logo), I made up a couple of my own.  Now I just need to decide which one to use.

These are a couple of my choices:

I have a couple more I am working on and I think I still have some editing to do on these, but I need to get it done quickly so I can get them made/ordered asap.

The Leak is Fixed

It took some time, but the leak is fixed and we can once again use the shower.  What an ordeal!  Last night after discovering the leak, I examined the connections, and there was indeed a crack in the plastic elbow.  It was right in the root of the thread.  Not having the time to take everything apart, and more importantly not wanting to, I was looking for a way to possibly patch the leak until I could get around to replumbing the line, especially because I don’t have a real good idea of how to fix it.  I ran to the store and looked thru the plumbing section for a solution, and bought some spray rubber, sort of like the flex seal commercials, and also some tape that was supposed to be for wrapping pipes to seal leaks.  My thought was to spray a few coats of the rubber over the crack, then wrap it.  Once wrapped, I would use a hole clamp to compress it all and keep it all tight against the surface of the elbow.

That plan sounds pretty good, but what actually happened was quitter different.  First, the spray said the rubber is dry to the touch in 15-30 minutes, and fully cured in 24 hours.  I put six coats on the elbow, one coat every 25 minutes.  Then I got it wrapped and clamped before bed so that Kris could take a shower in the morning before she went to work. 

At 5:15 AM I was up to turn the water back on.  It was only about 12 hours of curing time, but I thought with the extra coats, the tape, and the clamp I would be OK.  I was wrong.  After about 30 seconds or so of having the valves opened, I saw a drip coming down the pipe.  I was really hoping that it was leaking from someplace other than the elbow, but I was wrong.  So beginning at 5:30, I started developing a plan to get the pipe replaced.

After examining how the contractor plumbed it, I thought his method was really stupid.  First he put a couple of blocks behind the handle fixture (I still don’t know what that part of the faucet is called) to hold it in place.  Then, he had plastic elbows screwed into the brass fittings of the handle fixture, with a quick release on the opposite end.  This might have sounded good at the time, but since the elbow had about half an inch of clearance between it and the cement board used for the tile, there is no way to unscrew it from the fixture.  He did however solder a threaded end to the copper pipe to screw into the valve.  But, since I couldn’t remove the elbow, I was unable to unscrew the copper line as it would push up into the elbow as it was coming out of the valve, making the connection even tighter.

I ended up having to take a hand saw and cut the elbow in two pcs. to get it off.  Once I did that, the copper line came out really easily.  But the elbow, which was cracked about 50% of the way thru the thread, including the side facing the wall that the spray would not have covered, was now stuck in the brass fitting of the fixture.  And like the line for the spout, there was some sort of Loctite on the thread, so it wouldn’t just turn out of the fitting, and grabbing with a needle nose pliers just resulted in pulling off small chunks of PVC… another trip to the store to see what sort of a solution I could find to get the fitting out.  I was thinking that i need to get replacement copper pipe too so that whatever I decided to do with replumbing the line I would get a good fit. 

Luckily I found something like a screw tap (for removing screws that have had the head broken off) for broken pipe fittings.  There were actually several tools that did the same thing, so I bought them all figuring I would return whatever I didn’t need in order to prevent multiple trips back in case the first solution didn’t work.  Luckily the first thing I tried was able to work, though it took a little bit of doing since the ID of the plastic fitting was slightly undersize compared to the plug that was supposed to grab it.  I also decided to get some PVC line instead of using copper that is slightly flexible so that things didn’t need to line up 100%. 

Once I got the plastic fitting out, I was able to reassemble the line in about 30 minutes.  And the ease with which things went together was actually pretty amazing.  I have no idea why the contractor didn’t go that route in the first place given the confined space.  If anything goes wrong now (at least with the hot water line) I can get it fixed in 15 minutes.  So now I just need to figure out how to replace the cold water line, and redo the connection to the line going to the shower head without tearing a hole in the wall. 

Once I was done, I opened the valves and bingo!  No leaks.  I ran the tub faucet and the shower for about 5-10 minutes to make sure everything was good before noticing I still had water leaking into the kitchen.  I was stumped for a couple of minutes until I realized that the leak was coming from the drain.  After looking into it, I discovered that in assembling the drain cup to the pipe, I had cross threaded it, so my seal wasn’t tight.  Luckily that was an easy fix.  So by 2:00 PM, the leaks were all stopped and the tub was working once again.  I do however, still need to figure out how to replace the faucet handle without cutting a hole in the wall.  And I will need to now go back into the kitchen and fix the crack that has opened up from the water leaking.  It makes me mad after spending so much time working on fixing it in the first place, but at least I can sleep knowing that there is not water seeping into the walls and the tub won’t come crashing thru the ceiling.

Sprung A Leak

SInce the majority of the kitchen work is complete (only some minor details left to complete) it was time to get some of the other moinor projects that have been sitting on hold since we started remaking our kitchen.  I had replaced a mirror in medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom which has been sitting in the basement for almost a year.  We also purchased new bathroom fixtures last spring to replace the ones from the bathroom remodel about five years ago since the Glacier Bay fixtures we had in the sink and the shower had the finish all rubbing off.

I started with the faucet spout, which I thought would be pretty easy to get off and replace.  As everything seems to go when I do a home improvement project, unexpected issues arose.  The first thing I noticed was that I couldn't simply replace the handle and face plate for it since the assembly was quite different.  So therefore, I will need to figure out a way to get that done and continue to use the old handle in the meantime.  The problem here is that I do not have a way to access the plumbing behind the wall.  The connection box has access where the handle goes into the wall and I can only get to the hot water line thru the access panel.  so now my head is spinning trying to figure out how I am going to do that.

In the meantime, I thought I could get the other parts of the faucet reaplced pretty easily.  The first part I tackled was the water spout.  When I pulled the old spout, the length of pipe coming out of the wall came with it.  For whatever reason, the guy who did the remodel used what looked like some sort of Loctite on the pipe threads so when I turned it, instead of the spout coming off hte pipe, the entire pipe screwed out of the elbow that was in the wall.  It actually turned out to be a blessing, because I discovered that the new faucet had an adapter that was supposed to screw onto the pipe coming from the wall, and the spout would then screw onto that.  The pipe coming out of the wall was only supposed to be about an inch.  The existing pipe was 5 inches.  So I had to run to the hardware store to get a replacement.  

This wasn't a big problem, however after replacing the pipe and then screwing onthe adapter, and the spout, I discovered that the pipe coming out of the wall was not square, but had a slight angle to it.  I discovered this because when I had it screwed to the wall, it was not flush.  I thought this wouldn't be too big of a problem, I would just turn it as tight to the wall as it would go and it would square up as good as it could possibly be.  Unfortunately, the ends of the spout were scrathing the tile.  Since I didn't want to dig into the face of the tile, I found that if I tugged a bit on it as I turned, the pipe would move slightly out from the wall, so I coould then give it an extra two or three turns and when I let go, it would go square and tight to the wall.  Which it did.

I was moving on to get the drain replaced and I was having some issues getting the thread started.  But after some time, I get it on and tightened down.  However, when I was tightening down the push plug, I had over tightened it, and it broke (of course!).  As I was getting ready to head back to Menards to get a replacement, Kris started screaming from downstairs that there was water dripping down into the kitchen.  I quickly pulled the access panel off and could see that yes, there was indeed water dripping from somewhere.  I was able to turn off the water lines, and then started getting the water out of the cavity below the tub.  As I was drying things out I began looking for the source of the leak, and it only took a couple of minutes for me to find it.  When we redid the bathroom, the contractor used a plastic elbow to connet the copper water line to go from the valves (hot and cold lines) to the handle fixtures.  When I pulled on the pipe to turn the spout into the wall without scratching the tile, I must have pulled hard enough to crack one of the plstic elbows.  It looked like the leak from coming from the hot water side.

So now the whole issue is on hold until I can figure out how to fix it.  But now in addition to fixing the pipes, I believe I am going to need to go back down into the kitchen to fix the cracks from the water damage we had previously had when the original leaks were going on before we redid the bathroom.  Un-Be-Lievable!!!!

Happy New Year

This year, I didn’t get around to making a Christmas Card.  In November when it was time to start looking at doing it, I realized I didn’t have any nice photos to use, so I was planning on skipping it this year.  Then at Thanksgiving, I Kris wanted to have a family picture done, and she came to me at the end of the day after I was working in the basement all day wanting to know if I was ready to do it.  It would have probably been a better idea to do it at the start of the day rather than when I was dirty and sweaty.  So we ended up not doing one and I was fine with not doing a Christmas Card this year.

Then we started getting Christmas Cards, and we received one from one of Ali’s teachers who has retired.  We’ve sent her a card every year since Ali had her at Shady Lane, and when Kris read it to me, I felt bad not having one to send.  So I decided I had better do one.  But not wanting to be rushed, and still without a good family photo, I thought instead of a Christmas Card, it would be a Happy New Year card.  That way I can get them out “late” and still be in the window of the holiday.

So, Happy New Year from the Hahns!

I should also add…  This year, we only received about half as many as we had in the past from friends and family, so doing it later it made it much better since I knew exactly how many cards to get.  Maybe this will be the start of a trend.