Of Potato Heads and Faucets

People around the office are commenting on my potato heads, there’s just something alluring about both Darth Tater and the white armor clad Spud-Trooper, I suppose. Wait until I bring in Optimash Prime: that might just bring the house down.

On the domestic side, my kitchen faucet decided to bite the dust yesterday. My wife was in the middle of preparing lunch and apparently, it just stopped pouring water all of a sudden. Now, I’m not very well versed in engineering processes, but a faucet which refuses to pour water seems extremely counterproductive. In any case, my father was kind enough to come over to take a look, since initially we suspected that something might be clogging a pipe somewhere. After disassembling the faucet though, it was quite clear that the water was still running through the pipes (yes, we did turn the valves off before autopsying the thing - yay for being proactive). Upon going to the store though, I started losing hope that I might be able to resolve the issue by just buying the part I needed, since it seems semi-impossible to only purchase the spout part the faucet: you essentially have to get a whole new fixture. Either that, or send the part away to the manufacturer in order to get a new one, which wasn’t really a thought I was relishing. So I ended up in Home Depot, and even though the actual spouts weren’t available for purchase, I managed to speak with a person in the plumbing department who saw the broken spout I had been carrying, asked me to hold on a few minutes while he went a rummaged behind a display of some sort, and emerged with a spout that matched my broken one very closely (the tread was virtually the same size on both spouts, which would make screwing them into the actual faucet a heck of a lot easier). He then asked "How much do you think that’ll run you?" I answered that, honestly, I had no idea, but upon further prodding, threw out that I figured I’d be out $30. He answered that I was way off, and expecting him to name I higher price-point, I was mildly surprised when he said it was on the house. I thanked him for his help and made my gratitude pretty obvious, and needless to say I’ll be going back there if there’s ever anything I need home improvement wise: Nicely done Home Depot.

Changing gears, we’re roughly 8 weeks from our jaunt to London to attend the Starfury con. It still seems a little far away for my tastes, but hopefully the weeks will just fly by until then.