2016 in pictures

I came to a decision on my 2016 picture-a-day project - rather, I decided to settle on a lack of decision. I've kept taking pictures just because I've been doing it all year, I just won't feel the sense of urgency if I am in danger of missing a day because that has already happened.

The farmers' market opened for the season this weekend. There as not much in the way of produce to be had, but all of the craft vendors were out, and the public showed up in droves. In previous years, opening day has often been cool and rainy, but Saturday was warm (almost hot) and dry. The lemonade stand was loving it.


We drove down to the International Peace Garden yesterday. We have tossed around the idea of heading down there for years, but it is about three hours of driving each way so we kept putting it off.


The gardens are built along the border, north-south symmetrical (mostly) with a the chapel and peace tower at one end, and an interesting plateau at the other where there are rows of benches under shelters at either end, facing a fountain that straddles the border. Presumable so that people can sit in either nation and stare at people in the other country.

The chapel is very much an early 1970s design of concrete, limestone and orange glass. They really liked orange glass back in '72. There was muted organ music piped into it, and we were the only ones there at the time (another family came in just as we were leaving). It was really quite peaceful.


I imagine the gardens would be much more interesting in the summer season when everything is in full bloom and the fountains and streams are turned on. On the other hand, there is something to be said for going to a place like this in the off season. I would guess that we encountered no more than a dozen different people during our entire visit.


There was a stark contrast between the Canadian and US side of the gardens - more so outside of the formal garden area. On the US side there was an auditorium, a museum devoted to international game wardens


The biggest difference was when you wandered out of the formal garden area. On the Canadian side, there were picnic areas that looked like they had simply cleared the trees and laid out enough hewn-wood amenities to clearly identify it as a picnic area. They were linked by a narrow, winding roller-coaster of a road that that reluctantly cut through the forest with an economy of clearing. The US side was well-manicured, with clean picnic areas, and a two-lane road with a bicycle lane to boot.

It is all maintained by volunteers, and I don't know if it is a question of funding, bodies, or just differing visions. Either way, it was quite a striking contrast.

One interesting difference in the formal gardens (well, not counting the really nice indoor cactus garden on the US side - though I think that was just outside the formal garden) was this:


On the Canadian side there was as donated carillon, with a moderately cringe-worthy, awkwardly-worded plaque that described the history of how a small church in Brandon had been instrumental in moving it from England to its present location.

On the American side there was a shrine to 911, with some of the twisted and melted girders from the WTC. The shrine itself was actually pleasingly understated, but if I had turned 180° you could see the row of slightly gaudy, full-colour stars&stripes motif boards waxing about the attacks, and how the US had hardened its borders in the wake. I think the row of patriotic info boards did a disservice to an otherwise tasteful exhibit.

Plumbing

The hose for the spray nozzle on our kitchen tap started leaking some time ago. We don’t know exactly how long it had been leaking, but by the time atara discovered it, a lot of the things under our kitchen sink were thoroughly soaked through. We tried taping up the leak, and though that reduced the leakage, we have spent the past few weeks keeping the hose fully extended and lying in the sink while we use the tap.

One of my projects for this long weekend has been to replace the hose. We bought a new one some time ago, and I decided to tackle the job before dinner. My estimate was that it would take no more than fifteen minutes. I knew that I would have to remove the faucet to work on it, since the quarters were too tight under the sink, but I had included that in my time estimates.

My first hint that things might not go as smoothly as I had hoped was when I tried to attach the spray head to the new hose. The universal end on the old hose was a bit shorter than the one on the new hose, and the spray head fit on very loosely. I pulled the washer off the old hose and doubled them up, and that seemed to mostly fix it. Sort of.

I had already shut off the water to the sink, so I removed the feeder hoses from the bottom of the kitchen tap and unbolted it from the counter from underneath. When I had removed the hoses, I noticed that the washer from one of them had remained attached to the feeder pipe for the tap, rather than staying inside the housing. It hung there just long enough for me to take note of it before it let loose, bounced off my head, hit the floor and bounced again down the hole where the hot water pipe feeds up from the basement.

I employed atara’s help, and though she could see the washer sitting way down in the hole, we could not retrieve it after fifteen minutes of struggle. This was about the time that I noticed that the washer from the hose for the sprayer nozzle also appeared to be missing... and the new one did not appear to have been packaged with a washer. We weighed our options and decided that maybe it was just time to replace the tap. I’ve already done repairs to it over the years for other issues.

When we got to the store, I could not remember the exact layout of the custom plumbing under the sink, so I was not sure if we could actually use any of the stock feeder hoses that came with taps, or if we would need to buy one without feeder hoses. The sales staff were only moderately helpful though, since they had no way of knowing the weird plumbing under our kitchen sink. To their defence, they were programmed to deal with normal plumbing situations, not crazy MacGyvered arrangements. We decided to pass on a new tap and just buy replacement washers.

Or not.

When we explained what we needed to the guy in the hose and washer aisle, he told us in no uncertain terms that they did not carry either product in the size or style that we needed. We checked for ourselves after he left, and we came to the same conclusion. In the end, we bought the shortest, cheapest feeder hose they had (just for the custom washer), another new hose for the sprayer (again, just for the washer), and a new sprayer end because it was the same brand as the hose and we reasoned that it should fit (it was the same fitting as the new one we had already bought earlier).

I swapped the washer from the new feeder hose to our old (longer, better quality) one and hooked everything up. I opened the valve for the cold water, turned on the tap, and immediately a jet of water began spraying under the sink. I climbed under the sink and had atara turn on the tap so that I could identify the source, and discovered that the new hose (not the one we bought today, the one we bought earlier that had been lacking a washer) was leaking where it was attached. Huh. Not only had it been lacking a washer, but it had been defective too.

I stripped everything apart again and replaced the sprayer hose with the new one that we picked up today, and everything finally worked. I guess the joke was on us – we’d bought the hose thinking we would just strip it of its washer, but it turns out we’d needed the it after all.

Anyway, the whole repair job cost about $20, plus a lot of frustration. A fair bit cheaper than buying a new tap, I suppose, but I think a new tap would have been less work in the end.