Side Quests and Spigots – Blaugust 27

My Blaugust posts have definitely turned into a diary. Not normally what I like to write, but the posts must be posted.

I’ve abandoned the concept of playing World of Warcraft by giving the game my full attention. I played for two more hours yesterday while watching Hulu, clicking through the quest text without reading it, blindly killing mobs and collecting drops until the objectives were done.

In this way I’m plowing through the remainder of the side quests in Tiragarde Sound that I skipped over the first time through. (I previously skipped anything that didn’t sound like it was related to the zone’s storyline.) I reached level 117 in the process.

It was a lot more satisfying to play that way. It felt like breathing a sigh of relief. I no longer carry the burden of trying to feel entertained; the game only has to give my hands something to do while my brain is engaged elsewhere, which is something that WoW is very good at. Possibly not the greatest blurb for the box, though. “WoW: It gives your hands something to do!”

I’m hoping something interesting will happen after grinding my way to level 120.

Spigot Fail

In other news an outside spigot on my house started leaking in earnest yesterday morning. I should have known this was going to happen, because it and presumably the connected hose sustained a lot of damage during the extreme cold this past winter (note to self: don’t forget to put hoses away in extreme cold), but previously it only leaked at the seal between the spigot and the hose when I turned it on. Now the spigot valve itself won’t close all the way.

That led me to look in the crawl space under that part of the house for a shut-off valve. I looked all around from the crawl space door, but couldn’t find anything resembling a shut-off valve. Naturally the affected spigot is the farthest possible distance from the crawl space entrance, but I couldn’t psych myself up enough to crawl under my house through a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style cave of spiderwebs to follow every pipe looking for a valve. I live in an old house, and crawl spaces in old houses are just the grossest things imaginable (second only to sink drains), and I don’t have a hermetically-sealed hazmat suit, and I’m getting too old for that crap anyway.

There is a shut-off valve way over on the opposite side of the house for the main water supply, but that seemed a little extreme for the circumstances. The spigot is leaking a lot, but it’s not quite flooding (yet), and while I am on well water, I’m hopeful I won’t run dry in a couple days.

I have some reason to think that this particular spigot is connected to the hot water line off of the hot water heater (which itself seems very odd to me-quirky old houses, am I right?), so it seems logical that shutting off the valve at the hot water heater would also shut off the water to this spigot, but-naturally-the valve on the hot water heater won’t turn, and I’m afraid it’ll break if I try to force it, and that would turn a nuisance into a catastrophe real quick.

Finding Plumbers

The point here is that I can’t even remember the last time I had to find and call a plumber. Most of my life I’ve either been able to fix things myself, or lean on family or family-in-law for plumbing tasks. I can’t do that anymore, and spigot’s are a bit outside my wheelhouse.

Since I don’t even know where to find a Yellow Pages, if such a thing even exists anymore, I did some “how the holy hell do you find plumbers in 2018” Googling and ended up trying out a web site called Homeadvisor, which I vaguely remember seeing television ads for. I normally don’t expect much from these kinds of web sites, because they are often meant to be used in densely-packed cities like New York or Silicon Valley, where technology rules everyone’s daily lives. Where I live, there are still more auto parts stores than Starbucks.

But much to my surprise, the site successfully matched me with a plumber in my area. (By “in my area,” it means one county over.) They will allegedly be here tomorrow morning. Hopefully I won’t run out of water before then. (I prepared anyway just in case… well… I prepared in case I run out of water for coffee, at least.)