Speaking of Tornadoes

The last two posts were videos of tornadoes which is kinda ironic since I just heard that my buddy the Michigan Beach Bum had three tornadoes touchdown within a 40 mile radius of his house in the last couple of days. As far as I know no one was injured by these storms, which is good news.

There has been a bunch of powerful storms hitting various parts of the country over the last several days so be careful out there.

Another tornado video

since I'm at it here is another one.

Mother nature in action

Ok lets try this again...the original video from Hulu all of a sudden disappeared.

A little cash with little effort

I've been using YouData since January. So far I've earned about $7.00 with very...I mean VERY little effort. For some of you big time Bloggers that is not very exciting but I like it because it does take so little effort. Also they pay weekly to a PayPal account which is very cool.

For more information see my post on my other blog.

Please consider joining through one of my links.

My trade for plumbing

Since I needed the leaky shutoff valve fixed and lack the plumbing skills to solder a new one on I made a deal with my brother-in-law. He has the handy man/Mr. Fix-it abilities that I lack. I, however, am pretty good with computers.

So he came over and fixed my leak. He disconnected and cut off the leaky valve, then sanded down the remaining copper piping before soldering the copper connector to the piping. Then he connected the new shutoff valve to the connector and hooked up the feed to the faucet. It didn't look to hard but I didn't have all of the tools.

In return he needed a song edited for a workout CD he was making. After a quick search on the Internet I found a program called Audacity that allowed me to take his mp3 music file and cut out the unwanted sections. I did have to download an additional file for me to be able to export as an mp3. After exporting we burned it to a CD and was done.

Overall it was pretty easy and didn't cost me more than the parts.

More drips

The day after successfully replacing the faucet I noticed that the shutoff valve under the sink was now leaking. Bad news. Very bad news. The shutoff valve is connected to copper piping. Replacing it is going to require cutting off the valve and then soldering on a new valve. This project is getting a little beyond my plumbing talents. I may have to resort to calling in a professional plumber.

For the time being I've closed the valve for the hot water so it won't drip. The good news is the dish washer feed is just below the shutoff valve so have the valve closed does not affect the washing of dishes.

Of course the bad news is that fixing the problem will probably cost me at least $100.00.

Stop the drip

The kitchen faucet has started dripping. Of course this is a waste of water. But it also makes my well pump run more than necessary. Not good. Especially when I decided to see how much water was being run down the drain.

I placed an empty milk container under the faucet before I left for work yesterday and when I came home it was overflowing. So much more than a gallon of water was going down the drain every day.

We had purchased a new faucet several months ago in plans to upgrade the kitchen hardware at some point in the future. Well given the amount of water being wasted I decided to change the faucet out. Not a bad job to do. It took this non-plumber with a little guidance from my father-in-law about an hour and a half to complete the swap out.

So no more wasted water!!!