Monday, June 17, 2013, Guerneville, CA.
No water for my shower this morning
Yes, when I got up this morning and turned the shower water valve, there was only a dribble. That meant the repair I did on the water line yesterday failed during the night and let most of the water out of our holding tanks.
The first thing to do was go up to the water holding tanks and turn off the main water line. They are up in the woods about a quarter mile away. I hopped on my little four wheel machine and whet up and turned the valve off.
These are our three water tanks that collect our spring water from up higher in the hills and gravity feed it to our houses.
It was fairly muddy where we made the repair. I managed to mostly stay out of the mud. The pipe is repaired in the picture below. The leak was at the elbow on the bottom left, which I replaced and put the slip union in too. This will all be replaced some time this summer when I reroute this pipe to a new spot and bury most of it. This is our main water line, so it’s fairly important.
After I repaired the pipe, I went back up and turned the water on and came back to check for leaks. No leaks.
I decided as long as I was out and about I might as well go see how the loggers are doing over at our neighbors place, so I road the four wheeler up the hill to see what they were up too.
I tried to get them to talk, but they were all to busy, so I just took some pics.
Below, the machine on the left is pulling logs up the hill on a cable. The machine on the right loads the logging truck.
The bulldozer in the this pic is being used as an anchor for the cable machine which is out of sight and behind the dozer. The truck loader is on the right, ready for a logging truck to back in and get loaded up with redwood logs.
Here, the logging truck has backed in and is getting it’s trailer unloaded and hooked up ready to be loaded with logs.
Here, the logging truck loader is loading a log. The logs they are loading would be considered small redwood logs.
I took pictures and left riding back down the hill. I checked the pipe repair again and picked up the tools and put them away.
The day was still early, only noon, so I decided I might as well go down to Jenner and go for a yak, as my back was hurting and I thought I ought to get out of here so I wouldn’t work on things and stress it some more.
When I got to Jenner the wind was blowing real hard, so I drove out to the river’s mouth viewing area on highway 1, which over looks this area nicely.
You are looking at the river with the mouth closed and the ocean in the background.
This one is looking down toward Goat Rock. See the white caps and waves in the river? It’s really blowing today.
This one shows where the river’s mouth should be. No river water entering the ocean here as the sand has closed the mouth. Some harbor seals are beached down there too. You can see their skid tracks as they have to cross the sand to enter the ocean.
Ok, it was too windy to go for a paddle and take it easy and my back wanted, take it easy. I decided I’d go back home and putter in the yard and try not to do too much hard work.
I moved some leaves I had raked up to some trees I wanted to mulch with them, not too hard on the back and puttered doing a couple other small jobs.
While I was taking a break in my van I noticed the seat I use in it was about to fall apart. It’s an old office chair some one was going to throw away a long time ago that I had saved from the dump. Even though it was an old warn out chair, I liked it and it did a good job as my main van chair, so it needed to be repaired. The bottom board was all cracking up, so I had to fabricate a new one. The old one was made out of half inch plywood, so I made the new one out of three quarter inch plywood. I will also reinforce the plywood with some metal straps too.
I got the bottom board all cut out and epoxied the metal screw inserts into the new board. The inserts were pretty beat up and somewhat breaking up, so that’s why I epoxied them into place. The epoxy has to dry for twenty four hours, so that was all I could do on this project for the day.
The new seat board is on the left and the old one is on the right. See all the cracks from me sitting on it? I abuse chairs by leaning way back on them rather hard, so I’m not surprised this happened after a bit of hard van use. It was already not too good when I got it.
The rest of the day, I did take it easy and just did some planning on some more projects. I’m also pulling out my wooden cutting board in the van and replacing it with a plastic one.
The wooden one was glued together and the glue was failing, so it needed to be replaced. I also discovered while making tortillas that they stuck to the wooden one, but not to the plastic one, so the plastic should be a good choice.
My back is doing a little better and is on the mend, but still sore.
Had a nice day.
