windmills and wooden shoes and honduras.

k. part two of 'how books dictate my life'

This one time, (like last weekend) my roommate Rachel's parents were coming to visit. I folded all my clothes for the first time since... September probably (I'm not even joking), we organized all the food on our shelves so they looked nice, and had ourselves a through Spring cleaning. Monday night, everyone was gone and I decided I should clean the bathroom since... that's an important thing to do when you have company coming. (I learned that from my mom ;)) So, I started in and here's the thing with our bathroom- the sink is pretty terrible. It's this tiny little porcelain thing that moves everytime we touch it. Pretty iffy. Also, the plastic pipes are cracked so at the beginning of the year I had put plastic and duct tape around them to keep the water from spraying out. This works fairly well, but there's still a pretty steady drip so we keep a big bucket underneath that we empty every few days. Well. People were visiting- and not just any visitors- parents! So, we had to make it look we really know what we're doing here :) I thought it would be a good idea to readjust the plastic and fix it up a little bit. Once I took the plastic off, I decided the pipes were really gross and it'd be a good idea to clean them out. So, I took the pipes off and stuck them in a bucket of bleach water. Then I investigated. (If you've read Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, you might know where this is going. If not, keep reading because it gets better :)) I discovered that the sink was held on by a metal plate and the screws were loose and I thought, "Wow, if I can just screw this thing back in our sink will be fixed and everyone will think I'm ridiculously handy!" First problem- we don't have a screwdriver in our house. But we do have butter knives which ended up being the perfect size. Second problem: the sink is what water comes out of and there are tubes connecting the faucet to the water outside. I found this out when I thought I'd just take the sink off the wall and unscrew whatever that little white thing was attached to a tube running into the wall.... yes. I have a college degree, and yes a very powerful stream of water came shooting out at me and into our bathroom.


I solved this problem by screwing the tube back on and deciding to just hold the sink while I also screwed the plate back in. Slightly tricky angle, but do-able.... except for the fact that our house is made out of adobe, which is basically dried mud. This means that no matter how many times I screwed that stupid thing in, it was going to keep falling out because the wall is just not strong enough to hold it anymore. So I was stuck. Rachel came home (thankfully her parents decided to stay in town for the night and come see our house in the morning) to a soaking wet roommate and bathroom. We both ended up working on the sink for about 40 minutes, which included the oh-so-lovely water tube that was attached to both wall and faucet to this time come out of the faucet and spray both of us several, several times (after seeing me, Rach put on her swimsuit before helping so I would probably say she's the smarter of us two ;)). So what does this have to do with my book? I'll tell you! In Hans Brinker there is a story about a little Dutch boy who, on his way home, sees a leak in the dike and sticks his finger in it. He stays there all night because he knows if he takes his finger out, the water will make the hole bigger and bigger and pretty soon all of Holland will be flooded!


So, Rachel and I were two little Dutch girls with our thumb over a tube for a very long time (to save all of our house from being flooded!) before we decided to call a neighbor to see if there was any way to turn the water off to our house. Which, of course there was. So we set our sink on the floor and went without water until some people from school came up Wednesday and today and fixed it for us. Now we have shiny, new metal pipes; some branches that the cut to keep the sink propped; and a faucet that somehow got broken off and doesn't work. Which means.... we still can't use our sink, but that will have to be fixed another day. :) Anyway, it was a pretty fun time and quite the learning experience!


ps. It's taken me this long to find out that I can put pictures throughout my blog instead of all in a big clump in a separate blog , so maybe I can start being a little more high tech and add pics :)