Broken

Soldering copper water piping is a crappy job. It takes a long time, especially when you don’t do it very often like me. Sure, it’s kind of fun for a little while, but then it becomes work; too much work. When I put the new bathroom in the house, I changed all of our existing galvanized water pipes to copper. It was a lot of soldering.

Recently, I picked up a water softener from a friend. Our water is hard I guess. I never noticed it until we got that stupid dishwasher. It just doesn’t do a good job, and still bugs the hell out of me. I decided to try something different for piping the softener. There is a product called Propress, and it is a dream. It’s copper pipe & fittings, just like the regular stuff, but these fittings have o-rings in them. You slide them on the pipe, use a special tool (which I borrowed from work), and clamp the fittings to the pipe. It takes a minute. No cleaning, fluxing, heating, soldering; none of that shit. It can even have water running through it when you do it. No way you could solder with water running; that’s impossible. What would have taken me at least 12 hours to do with the solder method, took less than 3 hours with the Propress stuff, and that’s because I took my sweet time. Good stuff.

When I was working on the water lines, I pulled something in my shoulder. A serious pop and then pain. This morning while shaving, I pulled something in my lower back again; just like I did while brushing my teeth a few months ago. Between this stuff and my knee problems, I think there’s something wrong with me. It can’t be just age. I have a serious problem. I’m broken.

Peace-
Matt