You know what they say: Heir today, gone tomorrow. We didn’t really drive through a blizzard to go fetch plumbing stuff. It was a garden-variety snowstorm for February. There was six or eight inches of snow, followed by rain, with a subzero chaser. The snowy porridge it produced on the road was worse than ice. It was like icy grease. I drive an old van. It doesn’t weigh enough in the back when it’s not full of stuff, and it likes to skate. My son and I skated all the way to to the store. I never understood why Einstein

Notice: This tool will look this clean and shiny until it has been used for fifteen minutes. Then it will look like the inside of King Kong’s adult diaper forevermore. No, “getting an electric eel” is not a euphemism, although it has the makings of a great one. What I’m referring to is a tool that is known by many different names. Some call it a drain cleaner, others call it a drain auger. Some refer to it by the manufacturer’s name, the way Kleenex or Google or iPad is used to refer to any version of a thing, not

Why did someone call me a genius in yesterday’s comments? Is this like when you choose the ugliest girl as the homecoming queen, and then snicker behind her back? Yeah, sure thing, “genius.” I may not be a sooper gene ee us like Sippican, but at least I’m pooping indoors. My behavior didn’t feel very genius-y to me. I found it to be an example of something we used to call: Light dawns over Marble Head.  I was born in Massachusetts. That means that if I live in Maine for the next 140 years, I’ll be from Massachusetts. That’s the

Everyone in my comments is quite wonderful and I love you dearly. I know many more people read and say nothing, and I love them just the same. There is no unifying theme in my blog, just like it says on the masthead. There’s no way to know what you’re going to find here when you visit. For long stretches, it could be nothing. But some people stick with me, and enrich my life with their attention, and for that I am grateful. I feel as though I need to take a small detour (there’s a surprise), from plumbing into

As I was saying (there’s an understatement), your average civilian doesn’t know much about concrete. I’ve built a lot of stuff that had a lot of concrete in it, and I’ve had to bust out a lot of it, too. I’ve demolished concrete using the right tools, and I’ve smashed concrete using the wrong tools. Today, my son, we’re going to be breaking concrete without any tools. I used the word “any” only somewhat facetiously. What I mean is that we’ll be doing it with only hand tools, our strong backs, and our weak minds. Wait a minute, flip those