Spring Fundraiser 2015, Day One
Today is the opening day of Gates of Vienna’s 2015 Spring Fundraising Week.
To readers who are new to this blog: for one week each quarter we appeal to those who find our work useful (or even just entertaining) to visit tip cup on our sidebar, as the spirit moves them. In this way we manage to eke out a living blogging the Counterjihad.
The theme of this week’s bleg is “Stories” — that is, any yarns that Dymphna and I feel like telling, as long as they include a coherent narrative. Which leaves us a lot of latitude. And suits us just fine, because both of us are inveterate storytellers, as attested by the frequently upward-rolling eyes of our close friends and family members.
My opening story for the week will help explain why we are pushing y’all so hard this quarter. We’ve got a good reason to bang hard on the tip cup with a pencil — or maybe with a pipe wrench; that might make a loud enough CLANG.
It all started more than a month ago, just after the last hard freeze of winter. Dymphna discovered an infestation of black mold in the back bathroom, and I went in to investigate it. This is the bathroom in the “new” section of the house, part of an addition that was put on more than twenty years ago to accommodate my mother-in-law, who lived in it for the last part of her life. While I was examining the mold, I noticed a noise coming from the crawl space underneath. It sounded suspiciously like — gulp! — water running. I went outside and opened the crawl space cover, and sure enough, there was an immense pool before me and the sound of water trickling somewhere further back.
After an emergency visit by the plumbers the following day we learned that we had several leaking pipes, which had obviously been leaking for quite some time. Our crawl space has a vapor seal, which means there is a layer of plastic between the house and the ground, so we had acquired quite a swimming pool down there. Hence the black mold in the room above.
To make a long story not quite so long, the issue was a particular kind of plastic water pipe called “Quest”, which was popular with contractors about twenty years ago. Those pipes are now experiencing the same kind of problems almost everywhere they were installed, provided that they carry hard water. Which our pipes most certainly do — we live in Red Clay Country, and our well water is so infused with iron pyrites that we have a filter on the kitchen tap that has to be replaced periodically. We use it for drinking water (mainly for the taste; as far as I know the iron is harmless) and to avoid a rapid buildup of scale on anything that heats or evaporates water.
Those Quest pipes had copper fittings, which tend to become corroded by hard water and eventually start to leak — or even break, but we’ll get to that later.