journal features
movie reviews
photo of the day

the joys of weeks of plumbing

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2002.01.07

They're working on the water pipes in my building. First, they'll be installing valves all over the place to limit connectivity to different vertical slices of the building. Then they'll be installing a bunch of fittings and sandblasting the pipes. Then they dry the pipes with forced air. Next, they blast epoxy into the pipes, creating a new lining. After the epoxy has set, we're supposedly looking at 10 years of renewed life from the pipes.

Today we kicked things off with a visit by the fire department, when a plumber's welding torch dropped some hot metal into a section of wall that had bits of paper lining some fittings. I was standing in the hall talking with the building manager when the plumber came hustling out of the apartment at the far end of the hall, yelling 'fire'.

It all worked out, and in fact he had nothing to do with the pipe relining, but it was an amusing start.

rand()m quote

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

—Roald Dahl