LIVESTREAM UPDATE:

Hey guys, after a little hiatus, the livestream is back!  The next stream will be this Friday, May 10th at 10pm est!  Shout out in the comments what you want me to draw, and I’ll do my best to cover everything.  As always, I’ll be chatting it up and playing a game or two afterwards!

The stream can be seen by clicking either here or here.

See you then!

END LIVESTREAM UPDATE!

For anyone who saw yesterday’s Kat’s Korner, or saw what I was posting on Twitter, I was not having a great day.  In recent posts, I’ve mentioned how both our bathroom and kitchen sinks have been clogged, and after pouring various drain cleaners down the tubes with no success, it was time to bring out the big guns.

I went to a hardware store, bought a canister auger (which I call a drain snake), and returned home.  Here’s a view of the blue wonder:

Despite its fearsome appearance, I was unable to get the snake past the U shape at the bottom of the first pipe.

Whatever, I figured, lemme try the kitchen.

I laid out a large plastic bag on the floor which served as a platform on which I placed the contents of the kitchen sink.  Each item (dishes, pots, etc.) had been sitting in murky standing water for a while, and were all pretty slimy.

Great stuff right there.

Even though the sink was now devoid of tableware, it was half full of gross water.  I guided the snake down the drain, turned the handle a few times and

shhhhhhhhhhhh

The water was going down the drain, just like that!  Awesome!

After the initial excitement passed, however, I realized that the sound of the water was… louder than normal.

Louder?

Oh $#^%

Sure enough, when I opened the cabinet below, the gallon of gross water that had previously been in the sink was now shooting out of the pipe, which was sporting a nifty new hole.

I’d like to tell you that I exercised quick thinking and grabbed a pot to catch the vile fluid, but I didn’t.  Like a frightened deer, I stood still and… just watched.

I dried up the area with some towels and removed the broken section of pipe.

Just great.

It was now time for a trip to Home Depot.  Walking around holding the broken pipe like a dummy, I eventually found the right replacement, but needed a few inches to be cut off.

I asked a Home Depot associate where the cutting station was.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s just down the hall.”

Down the hall I met another associate and asked if he could cut the new pipe for me.

“You can get a hacksaw, only five bucks!” he said.

“You don’t offer cutting services?”

“Nope,” he responded.

Now, I’ve been to many a Home Depot before, and when buying stuff like chains, pipes, wood, etc, they would always have a cutting station to get you the desired length.

Maybe this employee was new, so I found a third guy to ask.

“Oh, we’re not allowed to cut anything in the building,” he told me with a smile.

What?!  Home Depot isn’t allowed to cut anything inside their store?  It’s Home Depot, a hardware store!

I thanked the guy, bought the pipe, and returned home.  Jackie and I have a hacksaw (for which she knitted a cozy), so cutting the pipe wouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

Unless you’re puny little me and it takes forever.

Once it cut to the right size (and brass powder was spread all over the floor), I put the new pipe in place, fastened it at the sink end, and then started tightening the bolt at the other end when…

The bolt broke into a million pieces.  It must have been really rusty or something.

I think I’m gonna stop this story right here.  In the immediate moments after the bolt broke, I had a minor freakout and was ready to give up and toss all the pipes out the window.

Since that time, I was able to properly replace the pipe under the sink, but was not able to fix the drainage problem.

After everything that happened yesterday, all I accomplished was brining us back to exactly the same problem we had the day before.

In other words, I accomplished nothing.

Fun day.