Today I’m supposed to tell you about the last thing I fixed or built.

The last thing I fixed was our bastard-ass bathroom faucet, like I do EVERY bloody day lately.

A couple weeks ago there was a notice in the paper that the town would be flushing the water mains and that water might “be temporarily brown in appearance” while this was going on, but not to worry, it would clear up quickly.  Fine, no problem.  Flush away, good sirs!

Two or three days after the water main flushing started, we had a catastrophic loss of water pressure.  I’m talking like, couldn’t shower, couldn’t do laundry, couldn’t wash dishes.  About the only thing we COULD do was flush the toilet (thankfully).  The landlord couldn’t figure it out, so he had the handyman come look at it.  It took the handyman almost 40 minutes of hemming and hawing before he finally grabbed a wrench and unscrewed the filter thingy on the end of the kitchen faucet.

“Oooh, look at THAT”, he said.

I peered over his shoulder curiously.  Lo and behold, the filter was full of sand and cack.  ‘Cack’ is our household technically term for unidentified gross stuff.

The handyman went around to the other faucets and the washing machine, which all have similar screens, and were all filled with similar sand and cack.  He rinsed them all out and everything worked beautifully again so I thought our problems were solved.

Thinking my problems are solved is usually where things take a down-turn, at least in my experience, and this time was no different.  The day after the handyman fixed everything, the shower suddenly went right back down to a trickle again.  Shortly after I stomped to the hardware store at 7:30am to buy a new shower head, knowing full well the old one was probably clogged up with additional sand and cack that I couldn’t get to in order to clean out (because it doesn’t come apart, it just unscrews from the pipe itself), the kitchen and bathroom faucets both seized up the very same way as before as well.

Being somewhat mechanically inclined myself, and being the type who doesn’t like to bother other people to do things that I know damn well I can do myself, I went around to the faucets with my wrench and I did the same thing the handyman had done – unscrewed the screens, found a bunch of cack, rinsed it out, re-attached the screens, et voila – happy flowing water, hooray!  Warm fuzzies and general smugness all around.

However, the warm fuzzies and general smugness have worn off now, because I have had to (literally!) rinse and repeat this process every day for the last week and a half now.  And my brand new $25 shower head that worked so wonderfully that first morning?  Has a markedly lower pressure output the last few days.  I’m giving it until Sunday, which will make two weeks of this bullshit, before I start calling the town office and asking when my taps are going to stop filling up with sand.

I probably won’t ask them about the cack though, because they’ll likely hang up on me.