Vanquished!

"I have vanquished the drain!"

This was Jake's proud announcement this afternoon.  We were having trouble with the drain in the kitchen sink, which came to our attention because my Mom noticed it.  Well, what she noticed was all the wet in the cabinet under the sink, and also that it was the fault of the sink drain (not the faucet).  FYI, my Mom will make sure that something is broken find something that is broken if she stays at your house.  Just ask my brother's garbage disposal, freezer, and washing machine.  Yikes.  She has quite a track record.

And thank goodness for this blog, for it is by the magic of searching the blog that I discovered that my Mom was suspiciously also here the previous time we had sink trouble (though that was with the faucet, in 2007).

But seriously, we are glad she noticed it.  The situation under the kitchen sink has always been a bit, well, suspicious. I really wish I had taken a picture of it before, but rest assured, there was a strange "venting" situation involving a piece of rubber tubing that was cinched off with a clamp.  Just cinch it up.

Thanks to the internets, our friends at Ace Hardware, our neighbor Lisa, and our handy friend Matt, Jake was able to get all the information he needed to take the drain out of the sink and put in a new one.  The one he was removing, however, was not really exactly like the ones that appear on the internets, which are, well, new and easy to attach and detatch.  While removing the old one, something broke into something else, and, well, there was need for a hacksaw.  I realize that a hacksaw isn't typically a tool one uses in plumbing, but in our house it is.  One of our previous (thus far undocumented) Adventures in Plumbing (TM) involved the simple removal of a shower head, which ended with the shearing off of a pipe, which required a call to an Professional Plumber to fix.  (Happened on a Friday afternoon, after business hours, of course.  We waited until Monday for non-emergency plumbing hours.)

But Jake has emerged victorious from this Plumbing Adventure, and without recourse to a Professional Plumber at all.  Three cheers for Jake.  He has vanquished the drain.

In other news of vanquishing, I have just sent off the article that I have been working on; it was my main goal of the summer to get it completed.  And it's still July!  I am very pleased.

And in other, non-vanquishing, though also awesome news, Lucy has begun ukelele lessons.  We're all very excited about this development.  More details in an upcoming post.  But for now, here is a Conversation with Lucy (TM) that Jake got to overhear at the lesson:

Lucy: My mom plays the violin.

Marieke (her ukelele instructor): That's right! She mentioned that.

Lucy: Well, she's not good at it.

Wow, kid, thanks for the vote of confidence.  I've been vanquished by my own child.

Oh, and if you'd like to read about Lucy's ukelele lesson from her teacher's point of view, you can read about it here:
https://storytosong.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/lets-play-ukulele/
(She asked for our permission to write about it, and we were delighted to see what she did!)