Aboard a bamboo raft in Yangshuo, March 2,2005
restless peregrine

It's NEVER all bad

It's almost 10 o'clock on a Thursday night and the good news is that my bathroom drain, which hasn't actually done what it's name would imply for something like a year now (atleast not without the assistance of COPIOUS amounts of draino), is. Draining. And without its usual chemical help!

The bad news is that it isn't actually going down the pipe, but instead, all over my bathroom floor.

Scrubbing a little more forcefully than usual in a burst of spring-cleaning fever and notice a little give that wasn't there before on the sink stopper. Hmmm. Push a little harder than normal and it's not the stopper that goes down, but the entire pipe that comes up. Woops! How did that happen?!! Oh right, cause the pipe's not actually solid anymore - more loosely packed formerly-metal gunge masquerading as solid. This is what life in an old house is like. How long does it take a steel pipe to corrode? Lead (dare I ask)? How old is this house, anyway?

Gross. Definitely not in the home-renters manual. But it's not like I have a landlord who'll come rushing over to fix the problem and I am afterall a moderately capable adult. Really. I can fix this. All I need is ... a Home Depot. All those gleaming aisles full of do-it-yourself STUFF. Open until midnight. Ready for me to fill my cart in those rows upon rows of tools, gadgets, supplies, helpful brochures to convince me that, heck, while I'm at it, why not just re-do the whole bathroom? It would be nice to have a bathtub...

WHUMP! (the sound of me coming back to earth)

Sigh. This is not the first time I have wished for a Home Depot today.

On the main road near my house are a profusion of shoebox hardware stores. Little Mom and Pop operations, they are to Home Depot what a delightfully dusty second-hand bookshop is (packed floor to ceiling with who knows what, threatening to spill on your head at any moment) to the biggest Chapters you've ever seen. If you don't know exactly what you want, those little shops are gems - never fail to find SOMEthing to buy. But if you need something specific, well, there's something to be said for huge and sterile and user-friendly.

Just yesterday I succeeded in buying a power bar AND stove lighter in the neighbourhood, even though neither one was on display (a serious set-back when you don't actually know the word for what you want and were never all that good at industrial charades). I strongly suspect that one or all of these little shops would have exactly what I need to take care of this pesky sink problem. But even if I could explain what's happened, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to go about fixing it. The whole damn pipe is mush, for goodness sake. I do not want to deal with this right now. Who needs a sink in the bathroom anyway?

Maybe the flood will drown all the ants I have been unsuccessful in exterminating. It's never all bad.

A child hangs out by the river near Yangshuo while his mother washes clothes. March 2, 2006, China.
restless peregrine