The Best Laid Plans Are Spoiled By Plastic
Let's play a game for a minute. Pretend that you have this big, fancy, elaborate thingamajig that you bought at IKEA. Let's say it has something like 213560987612 parts, give or take one or two. One day, you decide to buy a new house and you want to keep that thingamajig, but it won't fit in the moving truck fully assembled. So, you tear it apart, very carefully memorizing where each little bit and piece and part goes. You get to your new house and begin the process of reassembling the thingamajig, but alas! You seem to have lost one little tiny piece of the thingamajig! It's an important piece that connects the whatsit and the whosit together and you remember that it was sort of shiny, kind of a square but more of a circle, and it had this thing that went that way, but you have no idea what it's called. You realize that you're going to have to go to IKEA and ask them for help, even though you are basically going to be that idiot who has no idea what exactly the question is. You just know that you'll recognize the correct part when you see it.
Now, let's make our little game a little bit more complicated. Let's pretend that you *think* that the thingamajig probably came from IKEA, but there happens to be another store in town that sells almost identical thingamajigs. Yours might have come from there. Actually, it might have come from pretty much anywhere because it might have been purchased online. You still need that little part, but now it's harder because IKEA and the other places have totally different names for their bits and parts and you're really not sure which place you should check first.
Welcome to the wild, wild world of pond parts, otherwise known as my personal hell. I've been hanging out here for a bunch of weeks now.
So. First there was the drama with the digging. See, you kind of have to dig a hole if you want to have a pond. The problem is that it got to be REAL hard to do that digging when it kept raining every weekend. At one point, we completely gave up and started building a patio instead. When that was done, I used this space to whine about the weather, which, of course, immediately led to several days of clear skies. That's how it works, you know. The universe loves to prove me wrong so much that all I have to do is whine here and the situation changes.
Anyway, we finally managed to get the hole dug. A few thousand trips to the Lowe's later, the pond walls were reinforced with concrete blocks and the liner was in place. I filled my happy little pond with water, began placing all of the rocks, and got ready to plug in the pumps so we could have a waterfall.
The story should have ended there. But, it didn't.
As we lined up all of the filters and skimmers and pumps and UV filters and such, we realized that we were missing a piece. ONE PIECE. We were missing the thing that connected the hose to the filter, which pretty much meant the giant hole in the ground was nothing more than a giant hole in the ground. So, I set about trying to find that very small piece of plastic.
That's where the IKEA analogy comes in. Now that I have two weeks more experience in the Language of Random and Stupid Pieces of Plastic, I know that we needed a male threaded slip 2" to 1.5" reducer, unless you're shopping at a different store in which case it might as well be called a doohickey because I DON'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF RANDOM AND STUPID PIECES OF PLASTIC.
Ahem.
I tried Amazon, but they didn't have pictures so I could see if I was getting the right thing.
I sent Mr. Husband to every single possible store in all of Pittsburgh.
I perused every online catalog for every pond supply store in all of the United States and Canada.
I couldn't find the piece.
Actually, I take that back. I did find it at one point and it only cost $.99, but they wanted $20 for shipping. NO, THANK YOU.
In the meantime, we decided to get the *other* side of the pond running (we're running two pumps). We ran all the pieces, connected it all together, and TA-DAH!
The mother trucker was leaking. A lot.
We put on our detective hats and tore the whole dang pond apart looking for the leak. We finally found it, only to discover that WAHOOO! It was another stupid little piece of plastic! A gasket or a whatsit or a whatever had gone bad, so then I had to try and hunt that sucker down.
And then! And then! And THEN! Two weeks later, I discovered something very critical. I learned that the places that install sprinkler systems at golf courses and baseball fields and such sell little pieces of plastic! They have their own names for all of those things, but armed with a lot of research, I marched my butt in there and bought the pieces we needed.
There might have been a party that night. A big one. A VERY BIG ONE.
So we installed the pieces and gooped the sealant in all the right places and waited. And waited. Because sealant needs lots of time to dry.
When FINALLY it came time to turn the whole thing in, I held my breath, closed my eyes, muttered a little *please*please*please*please*please* sort of chant, and did it.
Tonight. Tonight I had every single piece and bit of pond thingamajigs running, for the first time ever.
Then I found another leak. An easy to fix leak, indeed, but the sort of leak that requires sealant. It requires sealant that can only be applied to very dry and very clean surfaces, and then it needs 24 hours to cure.
I'm predicting that the pond will be fully up and running sometime next year. You just know that once I get the leak fully sealed, another bit of drama will pop up.
I'm pretty sure the frogs that invaded the pond are behind all the shenanigans. Obviously, they hate me.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Reader Comments (18)
ps- frogs are tricky. when i was a kid we had a few we caught from a creek. somehow one of them got loose & we never saw it ever again, but sometimes we would hear random croaking. frogs are tricky little boogers. they might even take over the world someday.
:)
I'm just sayin'....
I'm stressed out just reading this... :(
And I love any post where you use the word shenanigans and thingamajig! I've got boys if you need someone to "take care of" the frogs...And by "take care of" I mean, you know, build a terrarium, catch live (LIVE!) insects to feed them, and that kinda stuff.