Posts Tagged → broken
Culprit
The last couple of days we have had no water because of a busted water line under the house. Yesterday we finally called out a plumber to fix the broken pipe under the house. You can see this pipe in the photo above showing how it burst on one side. Then we found the outdoor faucet was broken under the house on the front. You can see what it currently looks like below where the pipe is pulled partially out of the wall.
I am currently at home waiting for the plumber to return to fix the front faucet. This has been a pretty stressful week with all that has gone on. First my son had an accident when we had a surprise rain during a cold snap. This was just following him losing his job. Then we had this cold snap that brought us temperatures we have not experienced in a long time. The cold has caused us to have no water for the last two days. I really did not want to take off again today but we need to get this fixed. Things are going to improve for all of us soon. Sometimes we must have faith that God will bring us through the problems.
Things have already begun to improve as we reached the upper 50’s yesterday. The cold weather has passed and we are FINALLY seeing the snow melting from the blizzard we had on Christmas Eve. It is supposed to be in the mid 40’s today so hopefully we will be able to melt some more of this snow today. The next week we are going to call to have our ham radio tower taken down so we can sell this house. That will be one burden that I have been a little worried about. We have someone that will take it down and take it with him. The quicker we can get it down, the faster we can sell this house. I guess I have gone on and on about these frozen pipes so I will go ahead and post this and hopefully this chapter will be closed.
Sick of the Cold
In the above picture you can see where the water line burst under the house because of three consecutive days where the temperatures were in the single digits. We in OKC are not accustomed to long stretches of this type of cold. I was unable to fix this pipe and so we have no water in the house because I refuse to call a plumber on a Sunday. Not only have we had to endure this major cold snap but this whole year has been below normal. We had about two weeks in July where it got above 100 degrees but other than that it has been cooler than normal. Even before this cold snap it was pretty cold at least for us. That snow you see on the ground happened on Christmas Eve over two weeks ago.
For those of you that thing two weeks with snow on the ground is not that big of deal, we are not use to it. Also the homes are not built to handle this sort of cold here. At least the older homes like this one. This is another reason why I really cannot wait to sell the house because we are going to buy a new one next year. I just hope that the plumber has compassion on us and does not charge us hudreds of dollars. I am sure it will not be cheap but hopefully it will not be too out of control.
I have decided to go to work in the morning and call for a plumber at work. This is because if I took off the whole day the plumber would probably not even show up until I am supposed to be off work anyway. I have had to deal with that situation many times with the cable guy. Well I just wanted to give an update on how this weekend turned out. Not a good time for sure. I will keep you up to date.
Frozen Pipes
. Hopefully we will not have any more freezes of this magnitude.Broken Antenna
This week has been very busy with having to work overtime the last two weekends in a row and working two hours overtime each day. Some point this week, my HF antenna fell from the tower and landed on my next door neighbor’s power line. Both the antenna and her power line were insulated so it was not a big deal for it to lay there a couple days because I just have not had time to work on it. As you can see below, it is the antenna on the top and to the left. It is an Alpha Delta DX-LB Plus 6 through 80 meter dipole antenna that was quite expensive.
What happened was that I had the antenna suspended on a pole off the side of the tower at 50 feet by a pulley and a nylon rope. Some time this week, the rope broke sending the antenna to the power line below. Well I hoped the neighbor would not notice it until I would have time to fix it but she did. The night before last she came to the door about 8:00 pm and told us how concerned she was. Of course I had already showered for bed because I had to be up at 4:00 am. Well the next morning I got up and I was on that tower about 40 feet up at 5:00 am trying to pull the antenna off the wire. Because the antenna has large traps on it, the antenna did not want to cooperate. I eventually got it down but not after getting every dog in the neighborhood wound up. Man I have the most stupid dogs that live next door to me on three sides. These dogs will bark non stop for hours on end. If I did not sleep with a fan next to my head, I would never get any sleep.
For the life of me I cannot see what the attraction is to a loud barking dog. They have all the appeal of a wasp in attack mode. Oh well, I did manage to get the antenna down without destroying it though it is all tangled up. I hope to be able to work on it within the next few weeks and get it back up. I really am not up to climbing the tower any time soon because my feet have been hurting a lot lately. So this means that I will not be on the radio in the near future. Do you hear that lady next door? When your television is not working right, it is not me. Just kidding. She is okay but she does think it is me sometimes when it is not. That is part of the way of life when you are a ham rado operator. People will see your antenna and just assume that it is you that is messing up their television. I have been watching TV and not even have the radio turned on and people come to the front door and accuse me of coming in on their television. It just comes with the territory as my dad can attest to. He has had similar experiences at his house with false accusations
For the most part, things have been going fine around here except for all the overtime. Some people love working overtime but not me. I believe that time is the only resource that you cannot get more of. You can work and get more money but you cannot get more time. Fortunately my overtime is limited in scope and I work with some great people. I am looking forward to not working next weekend. Well I think that just about covers my week. I thought I should post an update since I have not posted much lately. I will try to keep this up to date more so you will know how things are going.