Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Slow week

This has been a week of fits and starts. Some great momentum on my work in progress has been replaced by a ragged, strained effort not unlike running my closed fist along a barbed-wire fence. La, writing!

I posted below, somewhat smugly, about how if it's boring you shouldn't write it. Physician, heal thyself: of the 900 words I bled out this morning, probably 600 will be lost in revisions. So it goes.

Lots of compensatory progress in other areas, though! Several days of boatbuilding have provided me with the dressed, measured, and shaped locust pieces that hold up the boat seats on the centerboard well. The centerboard is the vertical plate that is lowered down to help hold the boat upright. It slides down into a slot, like bread into a toaster. The toaster is the "centerboard well," and where the seats attach to either side, they need little supports to hold them up.

Considering that I started with a log, ending up with clean, straight, smooth, beautiful, tough, support pieces is a pretty cool thing.

Last but not least: I seem to have solved the Mystery Of The Unpredictably Stinky House. The culprit is neither fish nor in-laws, but a heat pump condensate pipe that drains into a P-trapped pipe that dumps into our sewer outflow. So far, so good, right? Except when there's no water in the trap, foul humors backflow up the pipe and ... directly into the intake vent for the heat pump. Lo and behold, the stink is instantly dispersed, along with heat, through the house.

Several days' travel and heedless gluttony will, no doubt, make me desperate to return to all three projects (book, boat, pipes).

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hooray! The mystery of the stink solved at last. Sewer gas was a likely culprit, although it sure did smell like a dead rat. The easy solution would be to install a one-way flapper valve in the P-trap. That job will be easy. Getting to the P-trap will not. Good luck!

S R Wood said...

Ha ha! I can EASILY reach the P-trap, and in fact funneled some water in this morning as temporary stink-fix.

I've smelled death and this always smelled different: sweeter, more vaporous and ... brown. Different from the thin, rank, nostril-closing pungency of ripe death.

Hey, this is working: I was trying to find a way to describe a certain characteristic smell without resorting to outright "It smells like....." Result!