Home this Weekend. Work in the Shower.

This was a stay-home weekend for me. It's not too surprising that after, like, seven trips in the past 8 weeks I needed a weekend just spent at home. And especially with last week— or the last 3/5 of it— being so busy preparing a customer workshop Wed-Thu, followed by delivering it on Friday, after getting a last-minute system failure fixed before 6am,  I was toast. I couldn't focus on anything else. I had no gas left in my tank to work on anything serious, such as preparing for session two of the workshop. It was all I could manage to finish my weekly reporting at the end of the day Friday.

This weekend wasn't all sitting around, vegging, though I'm not sure how much I'd have minded if it were. Instead, Hawk and I got busy fiddling around with one of our showers.

We'd left this shower unused for several years because small sections of grout and caulk were in poor shape. Well, two weeks ago Hawk buckled down (while I was out of town on one of my business trips) and patched the grout and redid the caulk. Great news, the shower's ready to use again, right? Except as we did start using it for a week we discovered that the shower head leaks.

The shower head is old...ish and was left unused for years, so probably a washer in it dried out. Yet it's new enough that it's designed in the "No user-serviceable parts inside" school of force-you-to-buy-another-one product design. So we couldn't just unscrew the face plate and replace the washer for $.30. No, we had to buy a whole damn new shower head. For the type we wanted, a roughly similar replacement, it was $55. Fifty-five dollars because we couldn't open the old one to replace a 30-cent washer.

Oh, but it gets better. And by "better" I mean worse. You know how everybody maligns low-flow toilets? Well apparently all shower heads are low-flow, too now. And our old one wasn't even that old. We installed it back in, I think 2008. Or maybe 2010. Anyway, it's not like it's from the 1960s or something. Or even the 1990s. But the new ones are all lower flow.

While replacing the shower head we discovered another problem. The shower valve leaks. The leak comes in the form of the shower head dripping water even when the valve is turned off. Probably another 30-cent washer problem, I grumbled to myself. But this one might cost hundreds to fix.

We took a crack at the shower valve on Sunday to see what we're working with. Unlike the shower head which can't be opened and fixed, the valve consists of several components that can be disassembled, cleaned or replaced, and put back together. We checked stores and found the "replaced" option would cost anywhere from $30 to $120 (plus the value of our time), so I tried the "cleaned" option first and put everything back together. No dice. It still drips.

So, we have new parts on order. It looks like next weekend will be another stay-around-home weekend. Stay around home and fix the shower, that is.

Canada Trip Retrospective

Canada travelog #32
Retrospective

"Wait, did you just go to Canada?" you might be wondering from the title of this trip. No, we didn't just go. This is the trip we got back from literally a month ago! Yeah, it's taken that long to get around to writing a trip retrospective. Why? Well, first of all, I was backlogged a week pushing out blogs from the trip. Then I got busy with other trips. Now I've caught up with all my September trips, so it's time to clear the August backlog! (Who knows how long it will take to clear the March/April backlog, though. 😰) So, here are Five Things:

1) First, on the whole, I'm glad we went. I fretted ahead of the trip about whether there'd be enough things to do to fill 9-10 days. Ultimately there were not enough things— though that was a case of unexpected conditions, not poor planning— and we cut the trip short, coming home a few days early.

2) Two days could've been enough time to visit family. Visiting long-lost relatives was the original reason for the trip. We spun it into a larger trip, adding in hiking a bunch of waterfalls, because we figured if we're going all the way to Toronto, we need to stretch the trip longer than 2 days to make the travel time worth it. (Not to mention, we really like hiking waterfalls. 🤣) Well, the trip would've worked at 2 days. I remember thinking Sunday afternoon, "If we had to head back to the airport now, I'd be satisfied with this trip." A key part of what made a weekend trip as distant as Toronto— similar in travel time to flying to the East Coast— palatable was flying first class nonstop on the red-eye out there. Getting even 4 hours of sleep on the overnight flight made it possible to have a mostly normal day Saturday. On trips where I've had to spend half of Saturday recovering from a sleepless night flying coach, leaving on Sunday seems too soon.

3) The ability to call an audible was important. We decided Tuesday, in the middle of our trip, to change plans and fly home two days early. Why? Because our plans to hike a bunch of waterfalls fell apart when we discovered that many were dry. I've remarked before maintaining flexibility in plans is important. In this case the flexibility allowed us to recover from unexpected adverse conditions. And we made satisfying use of the days we reclaimed. We spent all of Labor Day weekend at home, lounging by (and in) the pool.

4) I'm glad we kept hotel changes to a minimum. We stayed in once place for the family-visit part of the trip and another for the waterfalls-hiking part. Two hotels for 6 nights (originally 8 nights was the plan) seems kind of stay-put for me. So many times in the past I've quipped about staying at 7 hotels in 8 nights. This time I was glad we kept changes of venue to a minimum. Though I did fret at first when I saw how much driving, in traffic, we had to do to get to/from some of the waterfalls each day, I quickly realized it was easier to add a bit of freeway driving on each end of the day's journey than to have to deal with packing up our suitcases, checking out, locating the next hotel, checking in, and unpacking. It enjoyed the comfort of making a temporary "home away from home"— that wasn't just a spinner suitcase.

5) An easy pace was a good pace. Across the whole trip, both the family part and the hiking part, we under-scheduled our days. I fretted a bit about this a few times early in the trip, worrying that failure to plan aggressively enough would leave too much idle time and I'd regret missing opportunities. It turned out that only happened one day and it was because of crummy weather, not poor planning. The rest of the days we filled up to a comfortable level. The key was while we under-scheduled our days we also kept a list of things we could add in as time permitted. That flexibility let us find the right balance between taking it easy and taking advantage of things to do.