I worked with a fantastic team today. They have recently experienced some terrific results, results that greatly surpassed their yearly goal. The oldest fellow on the team said that their new status quo was a “capstone”.
I really like his description.
They didn’t get to that level overnight. This is just one more step in a long series of intentional steps. This is the result of years of diligence and focus. It’s like Dave Ramsey’s formula for unstoppable momentum.
Seth Godin is often encouraging entrepreneurs to show up and do their best vulnerable work, day after day after day, show up.
Tomorrow is one of those days where the little seed I have been tending leaves it’s safe little pot and is planted out in the garden. I have been looking at this opportunity for several months now. It might fall flat, or be so painful to use that it gets scrapped. If I’m evaluating this impartially, odds are it will just be ignored and will not live up to the ideas and possibilities I have in mind for it.
But maybe, just maybe, this little thing will be the basis for something much bigger. I really don’t know how big of a tree this seed might grow. If I never give it a chance to get out into the world, I’ll never know what could have been. You can bet this seed won’t grow very large at all if I keep it all safe in its little pot.
I started by drilling a pilot hole, through the bottom of the vanity (just off center under the wash basin) and continuing right through the floor. I fed some wire through the hole so I could find it easier from the crawlspace under the house. I wanted to make sure I was knew, when I was below the house, which pipes supplied the faucet (since there is a shower, bath, and commode all within a few feet of each other).
Next I went crawling into this hole from our backyard, which got me under the house. This gave me a look at the plumbing leading to the bathroom, and thanks the wire it didn’t take long to figure out what was what from underneath.
Once under the house, it was quite dark down there, so I took my Solar LED Lantern that my dad had bought me for my birthday. It was so light, ad bright enough, that it worked very well for me getting into position, then I dragged a corded work light in, because I was going to be in and out all day long.
I only had 18 – 24″ of total vertical space, from the terribly dusty old dry dirt underneath me, to the bottom of the floor joists above me. So much of my crawling was with my chest flat to the ground. I wore an N95 mask and full coveralls, but still got filthy and I coughed up dust later.
I made some determinations about which galvanized pipes I needed to cut. I was going to replace just the last couple feet of both the hot, and the cold, supply lines with PEX.
I headed to Home Depot with a plan to get the PEX and necessary adapters.
The gentleman who assisted me steered me away from any kind of compression fitting, or other work-around fitting, into the galvanized. He said even if I had to replace 30 feet of the galvanized, I’d be much better off by finding the closest threaded end and attaching the PEX there. He also told me to try PB Blaster on the old fittings, since I had seen they were pretty rusty. I grabbed two 14-inch pipe wrenches (one aluminum and one steel) and went back home.
I filled a bucket with water, in case we would need the toilet twice before I had the water back on, and then I shut off water to the house and opened the taps on the tub to bleed the lines.
Back under the house, I used a cutting blade on my angle grinder to sever the sections of galvanized line I was removing. There was still a decent amount of water in the lines, and some ran down on my grinder, which I didn’t like mixing electric and water. Maybe I should have found a way to bleed the lines better than just opening the tub faucet? But hey, silver lining was that the pipe didn’t get hot (hate to have any kind of fire risk under an old wood floor) while I made the cut because it was water-cooled.
With the PB blaster in place on the fittings, it was quick work to remove the pieces of galvanized. This was a great moment, because I knew I was now past the blockage that caused me to do all this in the first place. These lines were connected to taps that had good pressure, which meant I could run new lines to my bathroom sink and have good pressure there as well!
More to come.
We left Sandalwood Ave, and moved to Auburn St, this past April. We had rented an older, but clean, house through a management company for the 12 months previous to that.
When we did the initial walk-through of the house, before we signed the lease to rent it, we discussed many things that still needed repair or replacement.
One of the issues in the home was the master bathroom sink. It had no hot water flowing to it, and it had poor pressure from the cold water tap. The handyman told me he would fix it soon after we moved it. We contacted the company nearly every month and the response was always the same, “we will tell our man to fix it soon”.
He never fixed it. We lived there for an entire year without hot water in our bathroom sink.
Our home on Auburn also had a shoddy bathroom tap. When the faucet was opened up wide, the water came out from the tap much too slowly. Fully on, it could be better described as leaking rather than flowing.
Today I finally had the gumption to tackle it. It took several hours, but it was successful in the end. I’ll write more about the techniques soon.
We could be talking about a housing unit for chickens, or we could talk about my favorite type of video (and board) game – wherein you play with a friend instead of going solo. Instead, let’s consider “CO-OP”s, organizations explicitly arranged around cooperative action.
My family was, as many other homeschool families were, part of a food purchasing co-op. I can remember, on occasion, helping sort hundreds of pounds of bagged bulk-grains into each families pile per what they had ordered. This co-op gave us access to resources and prices we could not have easily obtained from other methods.
But that’s not even the co-op I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the $50,000 lecture. You see, I heard a lecture in undergrad that the prof called his fifty thousand dollar lecture, and he hadn’t even given it that name. It was the same lecture he had given to land and resource managers within the USFS, FWS, and BLM sometime before. After delivering the speech, a gentleman approached him and asked where he had been 5 years ago, because that talk would have saved him fifty grand and years of wasted time.
The essence of the lecture was teaching us to find sustainable solutions to conflict. Public lands are used in as many ways as their are people who want to use them, and as future managers of those land resources, we need to find solutions to ongoing deep conflicts over the lands. The best way to do this – CO-OPs of the stakeholders, the people who really care about the lands. No matter how far they seem to be divided, user groups that respect each other can actually agree on many things as good for the land and the future, and finding common ground can get people off their accusative rhetorics and onto beneficial solutions and teamwork.
It was an absolutely beautiful lecture, and I’ve carried the thought with me when I’m looking for solutions to any kind of conflict.
Unfortunately, respect seems to be rapidly draining from our public conversations. Outrage is the new norm. We feel the need to silence all dissenting voices, and disagreement is perceived as equivalent to hate.
I rejoiced when I recently heard about someone bucking this trend, and pursuing meaningful conversation from all sides, and real change. Not only a positive example of this kind of co-op, but one that bridges two places of my own experience and passion that are deep to me. Two separate societies, of which I am a committed member of both, that don’t see eye to eye, and often think the other has done little more than given them a black eye. I long to see them married to one another. Conservation Biology and Modern Agriculture.
This thrills me, and I want to see more of these.
Please check them out!
Debt Free by 2025.
The first day of 2025 is only 72 months away.
Student loans on the first day of 2019 – $168,867
Mortgage – $149,069
The only way to be debt free is to take one step at a time.
$2350 principal per month will pay off these student loans.
$2070 principal per month will pay off this mortgage.
Let’s roll.
A Flavor In-Between 