Have you ever run a drain snake? I’m not talking about those little hand crank jobs that you get the hair clog out from under your sink. No…I’m talking about that big ol’ mama honkin’ electric job like a plumber uses. We have a drain at the bottom of the back staircase down into the basement that gets clogged with roots and the like and really should be snaked out once a year. Well…it hasn’t been done for three years and this spring we had a mess on our hands.

When the drain gets clogged, the water backs up and comes in our basement. When this happens, we have to take the carpet cleaner and suck up the water. It’s a mess and king sized pain in the patoot. We decided to buy one of these snakes instead of rent them over and over and yesterday was our lucky day. We’ve had dry weather so before it got too hot, we got to work.

I’ve never run one of these things, so I watched Mr. FixIt closely. There is a cable with blades on the end. There is a power switch that starts the cable to turning. Then you feed the cable down into the drain. In our case, it has to go about fifteen feet then makes a hard turn so you have to navigate the blades through there. Then, the cable is fifty feet long. The object is to get all that cable down in there to chew up any roots and clear out the drain.

We had to run it down and pull it back several times to remove roots from the blades. It’s really hard on your back, so I finally took over and did the feeding. The last two times we put it down, it hit snags and I could not seem to get it to go past that point. By then the sun was overhead and it was getting really hot so we gave up on it for the day.

I love to learn how to do new things. I love learning how to be self sufficient…not that I’m thinking I’ll have to be any time soon, but experience has taught me it is best to know how to do what needs to be done. We’ll get back to it today. I picked another pan of tomatoes last evening so I have enough to can some. I ordered more pork picnic roasts to smoke and can. And, it’s just about time to bake bread again. We found more canning jars in the basement so I’m not as short as I thought I was. And, there’s a dehydrator so I think I’m going to try drying some of the Roma tomatoes and pack them in olive oil to preserve them.

This is a beautiful time to be alive…if you LOOK for the beauty. It’s still out there!

❤️

“God makes everything happen at the right time. Yet none of us can ever fully understand all he has done, and he puts questions in our minds about the past and the future. I know the best thing we can do is to always enjoy life, because God’s gift to us is the happiness we get from our food and drink and from the work we do.”

Ecclesiastes 3:11-13 CEV