Simple

Today is an odd day. The boy and I are going on a vacation to Silver Dollar City in Branson tomorrow and the next day and staying in a hotel that has a big indoor water park. (Haha – I get to put on the asshat hat and be heap big consumer. Geez, got a tractor and defaulted back to BAU, huh?) The boy was sniffling yesterday so as soon as he got home from school I Snake Oiled him, the wife cooked up a potion, fired up the woodstove, got the house sweltering, and put him down for bed early. Today I’m keeping him home from school, ramping up the home remedies and have duck taped him to the bed, plugged him into the tv, and force feeding him natural chicken soup. He’ll be okay tomorrow, and I won’t be out money for cancellation charges. Always the cheap shit, me.

So I’m not really working today – just living. Doing some cooking, bringing in a three day supply of perfect split wood for the wife to tend the fire with, and will bring up a few days water for her shower and coffee. Pop by the feed store and get a yummy bale of hay for the goats to munch on and stay in the god damn paddock when the wife is at work the day after tomorrow. And it’s like a beautiful sunny 75 degrees outside with no wind – one of the six perfect weather days we get in a year – which is a fine afternoon to de-junkerate the car and wash out the cooler. I have no stress, no worries today and y’know why that is? It’s because I’m not trying to build shit for a tomorrow or do anything but just exist today. All I’m dealing with today is eats, water, fire, sleep, and commune with the family and critters. I don’t care what’s happening with the cabinet guy, whether the pump guy is getting my new pressure tank; I don’t have a hammer in my hand banging on the kitchen remodel. I might cover the hole in the garage roof that we cut out to pull the well pipe, but weather dot com says zero chance of rain for a week so chances are I won’t even do that.

A sprinkling can full of water lugged from the spring heated over a fire thing is an appropriate technology shower – but is looked at as a royal pain in the ass. It’s easy to overlook the infrastructure maintenance and the complexity involved in all the components of a modern state of the art indoor pressurized plumbing system – and here’s our stop gap measure fer washin’ yer ass while the well is down:

At least 60 bucks worth of bilge pump and pvc pipe weirdness, hours worth of tweaking to optimize the system, and it’s billable glory is as petty as not requiring a human helper to have water dump on your head. Don’t get me wrong – the wife loves it and far be it for me to pooh pah that which her income make possible.😀
Of course women don’t get sodium calcite formations in their armpit hair so it’s possible for them to work the lever with one hand and rinse spots guys have to scrub at. I’m still bathing in the toxic water that burped out of the rusty pressure tank.

There will always be a pain in the ass level of complexity for me to deal with due to the nature of our existence. The root problem isn’t the engineering required to rig up a human powered pump for getting water from the spring into a gravity fed system at the house, it’s that the damn house wasn’t built by the spring. The builder must have thought it too inconvenient to have to drive another few hundred feet from the road and walk down a large flight of steps to get to the house. Back then labor was cheap and modern plumbing was all the rage. Only an animal would drink from a spring…