Against my better judgment, I did, indeed, venture out amongst the humans yesterday – but only as far as Home Depot, and only because I needed to get some stuff to do some fixes around the house (being a good little consumer, though, I couldn’t resist picking up the little compressor they had for $69, which also came with a brad nailer/stapler. It’s a handy little bugger). The main thing was to take care of a couple of leaks in what has become the bane of my existence – the waste pipes. Fortunately, yesterday wasn’t going to involve anything major or nasty. So I thought. First off was a fairly slow drip at the point where the soil pipe leave the house. What I have is an old cast iron ‘Y’ and cleanout with 4″ PVC shoved into it, and it was leaking at the packing a bit. I don’t happen to have a lead ladle (not that I can find, at least), and I don’t know if that’d be a good idea with the plastic anyway, so I got some some goop to smoosh in there that’s designed to harden up. As a backup plan, I got a rubber doughnut. Fortunately, the packing sucked up the goop pretty good, and seems to have solved the problem. Cool. Next, a slightly more involved item.

There’s a 4″ line that has a nearly horizontal run the length of the basement (behind a wall for a good stretch, just to make it a pain in the ass), with a 45° elbow that was leaking. The elbow is in a pain in the ass place, but relatively accessible, so no big deal. Now, had I been thinking, the leak, elbow, and fact the the line really wasn’t pitched properly would all have been clues as to what would be lurking there (not to mention the smell as I started to cut into the pipe). Not really sure what I might have done differently – except maybe put a bucket underneath the pipe, but well, I wasn’t really thinking.

So, not to get too graphic, but there was a pretty large amount of what I’ll call raw sewage in the pipe, and it was most definitely not a pleasant experience. But once you’ve cut things open, there’s really nothing left to do but persevere. And then promptly shower. Hopefully I’ve got a little better pitch in the line now, if nothing else.

So, yesterday was fairly productive, all things considered. I hadn’t set out to accomplish a whole lot, but I did what I wanted to do. I should probably make a run over to the old house and grab my table saw and some more of my tools, but it’s kind of cold out, we got a nice little dusting of snow overnight, and they say we may pick up a couple more inches over the course of the day today, so maybe I’ll just hang out and do laundry while hoping that SU doesn’t stink it up too bad against Boston College at noon.

Just not in the mood for too much more than that, I don’t think. Especially with the thought of Monday looming on the horizon.