I’ve got a really gut-level reaction I can’t get rid of. I was unable to sleep this morning (just amped up, I guess – still not really thinking clearly, but too jittery to sleep nevertheless), and so I decided, on my way back from picking up the Mini (whose repair job went *beautifully* – let me recommend Taymuree Foreign Auto Body to anyone who needs bodywork done in Oakland), I stopped at Longs to get batteries for the doorbell (the first time we’ve had a doorbell in four years), and picked up a little drain snake as well – it was $14, so I figured it’d be worth a shot. The problem is that we have a clog somewhere between the upstairs and the downstairs bathrooms. This clog went undiscovered for some time, due to the fact that it a.) isn’t a total water blockage, and b.) the pipes are… temporarily joined, so the system leaks under the house when it floods – it doesn’t “back up.”

I know what the problem is – the problem is that our ex-housemate flushed things that shouldn’t have been flushed. While the manufacturer of the product says that they’re flushable, common sense and all documentation from the municipal district say that they should *not* be flushed. So, she says she had no way of knowing, and thus it’s my responsibility, while I say that she shouldn’t have been flushing those things in the first place, and thus, it’s her responsibility. I ended up caving in, and I sincerely regret it to this day. It cost me $100 to fix the problem when the downstairs bathroom clogged on Christmas day, and my dad helped me unclog the thing with a power augur we rented from Home Depot. Unfortunately, we didn’t think to also snake the *upstairs* bathroom, and as a result, when Ei-Nyung & I moved back upstairs, only then did we realize that the upstairs bathroom is clogged as well.

The thing that sucks is that the clog isn’t in the pipes within the bathroom – it’s actually in the main – probably at a ~90 degree bend at the corner of the house, where the upstairs main heads down towards the downstairs. I spent this morning snaking the drain from underneath the house, where I removed the drain pipe from the upstairs bathroom sink, and fed the snake in through that opening. The problem is that the snake I bought is only .25″, and because the main’s so large, when it gets sufficiently torqued, it simply folds back on itself, and twist up into a useless ball. I think I *may* have hit the clog, but it’s genuinely hard to say, and I have no way of testing it without reassembling the drain pipe to the sink, which sucks, because I either have to glue it to do it properly, or go get some pipe tape, to temporarily stop it up enough to work.

The bathtub, which is the only thing that has the throughput to illustrate whether the clog is clear or not joins the main at 18o, on a sanitary cross, from the sink drain. As a result, if I just friction-fit the pipes together, when the water comes down from the bathroom, it has enough inertia that it just pops the sink pipe right off. The alternative is maybe to have someone else fill/empty the tub while I just hold the pipe in place, but I’m the only one home right now.

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NEW: Sometimes, it takes someone else to put your perspective back in order. I got the proper kick in the pants, and business between me and someone else is business between me and someone else – not between me, them, and the rest of the world. This isn’t a private ranting area (though sometimes I wish it was – that there were permissions you could set, a’la Flickr), and content will be adjusted accordingly. Apologies if anyone was offended.