Ok, I don’t actually watch the show House. I’ll just say that right up front. I’ve seen bits and pieces here and there but I’ve never watched more than five or ten minutes of it.
That said, I do watch the commercials for it because they show them before and during American Idol, which I do watch.
Anyway, my wife made a comment about the show a while back, and I thought it was funny because I had never thought about it before. Basically, she said, “How come every in every episode he comes up against his biggest mystery yet, or his toughest case ever?”
Now every time I see a commercial for House, that’s all I can think about. Either this guy is the crappiest doctor ever, or just the unluckiest. Basically, either he slept through 90% of his classes and 95% of his residency, so that even a case of poison ivy would tax his medical abilities, or he’s just an awesome doctor who happens to have every poor schmuck with some funky new disease rolling into his hospital.
It seems like the whole premise of every show is, “Ok, how can we mess someone up so they’re worse than the poor schmuck in the last episode, without them actually being dead, just so we can keep saying it’s his toughest case ever?” Eventually they’re going to one-up themselves so far that he’ll actually be raising the dead. He’ll have to call in Dr. Herbert West from the Re-Animator movies as a consultant so he can learn how to make the re-animation serum, only he’ll improve upon Dr. West’s work so that the serum actually brings people back healthy and stuff.
Anyway, I just thought I’d mention it because I found it kind of amusing.
Speaking of American Idol, Jordin did awesome last night, but the judges spent the whole night kissing Melinda’s ass big time. Blake is just getting annoying. He’s a talented guy, but everything he does ends up sounding the same. He’s a one trick pony. The results were too close to call last night, so the one who leaves tonight is totally up for grabs. I’m thinking if it’s really close the producers will probably send Melinda home because she’s the least commercial of the three and a showdown between Jordin and Blake would bring them better numbers and more money than a Melinda and Jordin one.
Not taking anything away from Melinda here, she is a great singer. The problem is, she’d end up being like Reuben Studdard. She’d come out with one album and then disappear for a while, only to re-emerge with some gospel album or something that no one but her family would buy. The producers don’t want that. They want someone to win who’s commercial and can sell albums. Jordin and Blake fit the bill perfectly, so I REALLY wouldn’t be surprised to see Melinda going home tonight. I would however be surprised, and deeply saddened if Jordin goes home. Of the three, she has the brightest career ahead of her.
Ok enough about American Idol. Now it’s my time to bitch. Who the hell ever came up with the design for the main valve / back flow unit for sprinkler systems? Obviously it was some sadist who gleefully rolled back in his chair and spun around in circles waving his hands in the air in celebration of the monstrosity that he had just unleashed upon the world.
We didn’t have our sprinklers blown out last year because frankly we couldn’t afford it and they charge an arm and a leg to come blow them out. So it was decided we’d just take our chances on having a mild winter. Well we did, but the valve still froze, the bronze cracked and it leaked all over. Ok, dumb move on our part, but at least it was easy enough to replace…right? Um…no.
I call this one sprinkler place and the guy never calls me back. So screw him. Then I call this other place and talked to a really nice, honest guy. He told me that if I had him come out and do it, it would be about $385 bucks because he’s a contractor and would have to get a permit to do it and then have the work inspected by a plumber after. That’s just the law. Then he told me I could do it myself for about $80 bucks and that I could get everything I needed at Home Depot. So it’s now costing me more than twice what it would have cost to blow the sprinklers out myself. Ok, fine…whatever. So I take apart the old assembly, which was an absolute nightmare and broke one piece of it even more, and I took it into Home Depot so I’d know what parts to get. As he said, it all came to around $80.
I did have some questions while I was in there about how to do it, how to seal it properly, etc… I also needed help finding the valve. Now, Home Depot is always advertising how their helpful and friendly staff will help you sort out all of your household projects and what not. Let me just say, that whoever wrote those commercials, obviously never visited the Home Depot here in Boise.
If you’re LUCKY, you might find one employee in about every third or fourth isle you check. About 80 to 90% of the time, if they pass you in an isle while you’re looking around, they’ll just keep on walking and not even offer to help you find what you’re looking for. Not that you would have much of a chance of getting their attention anyway since they’re usually talking on their phones or radios.
When you actually reach the point where you just can’t find what you’re looking for, good luck finding anyone to ask. When someone is lucky enough to grab one of the orange vested home improvement elves, they help that person, relegating you to standing there waiting like an idiot for god knows how long until they finally finish up with that person. The thing is, you only get to ask Mr. or Ms. Orange Vest if you have your running shoes on, because as soon as they finish with that person, they take off running like someone set their ass on fire.
Then you see them all collected in various spots bullshitting about whatever fills their lives outside of work, which must be a considerable amount of stuff since work doesn’t seem to take up too much of their time.
Anyway, so I get the stuff and bring it home, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to put the thing together. It would have been SO simple if one of the ends on the connector piece had had reverse threads so I could just screw on the main valve and then put the connector piece between the two sides, turn it, and have them pull together in one fell, harmonious swoop. Turns out, it wasn’t that simple.
You have to turn the whole damn main valve two screw it onto the connector piece and screw the connector piece into the other side. Then the piece that comes up out of the ground screws into the bottom of the main valve. Somehow that piece coming up turns without going up or down. I’m not sure how that’s set up, but it sure as hell wasn’t obvious. It took me three days of messing around with it to figure out how the hell to put the damn thing back together, and then naturally the first attempt leaked at the connector piece, so I had to unscrew the main valve and put all my weight into trying to flip it one more time so it would screw on to the connector more. Finally I managed it and got everything together and it actually didn’t leak. By this time I practically had heat stroke, so I gathered up my tools meandered back into the house (my actual house…not the tv doctor), flopped out on the couch and had a nice cold soda, happy that I had finally solved the puzzle, but irritated as all hell that it needlessly had to be such a pain in the ass.
Man, why does everything in life have to be such a bitch?
I’m going to buy an air compressor and a blow out kit later on in the year and blow out my own sprinklers from now on. That way I don’t have to feel guilty about spending tons of money to do such an easy job every year, and I won’t have to deal with this crap again.
Anyway, that’s enough for now. I need to get back to sleep. It’s 4:44 am and I’ve been writing on this for a while, so I need to shuffle back off to dreamland before I lose out on the rest of my sleep time.
(Current Mood: sleepy

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