PVC is Lame

So today I was planning on driving back to Olin around noon (after lunch). As soon as I ate breakfast at 11, I knew this wasn't going to happen. Being a realist, I changed my goal to leaving at 1. As it turned out, my dad asked me to help with fixing the irrigation system a little before 1. OK. There goes that plan. Anyhow, fixing the irrigation system didn't turn out to be all that hard; we were basically replacing one piece with another just like it.

The neat part was when we tried it out. Every winter we turn off all the water that would flow outside (pipes with water tend to freeze and explode in colder climes), so my dad went down to the basement to turn the water back on. Meanwhile, I was to wait next to the outside faucet and turn it off when water started coming out. Then it started coming out.

Out of a huge crack in the PVC pipes. The crack was massive; it went through 4 different pieces. I yelled down to my dad to turn off the water. Man that crack was impressive. So we couldn't test the irrigation system. At least we could get the pipes ready to fix. Wrong. In our attempts to remove the pipes we ended up doing a far better job shattering them. The best part was the end of one PVC pipe that remained inside a metal pipe (with some adhesive thing for extra points). We tried to lever it out, we tried to chisel it out, we thought about melting it out. Nothing. At some point we called it quits and I left for Olin; I hope my dad can get it out without melting it. The moral: PVC is weak; break it at strategic points instead of at random so that you can unscrew the parts that need to be unscrewed.

Due to luck with traffic, I got to Olin at a pretty good time despite my delays. :-D

The most interesting part of the day was probably providing a nominal amount of tech support for my Mom. She had made a nice layout for something church-related and our printer is old (word on the street is we're finally getting a new one; ppl should listen to me sooner). What this meant is she had to print it out somewhere else, so she had to transport the file. My mom asked me to burn the file (all 21 kb of it) onto a CD. Unfortunately, the burner was being dumb and so this wasn't an option. I suggested e-mail but my dad beat me to the punch with a flash drive. A while later I got a call asking about where to plug it into a desktop. I told my mom and her friend to try looking on the back of the tower. Great success! My mom's friend was evidently very excited by the technology. Cool!