You're either with us or against us

But the "us" isn't always against the terrorists.

We all heard about how the Bush administration gave money to the Taliban because they had supposedly stopped opium production. Did you hear the allegations that they were trying to cut a deal with the Taliban for an oil pipeline, so they blocked FBI investigations into al-Qaida terrorism? FBI diirector John O'Neill resigned to protest this. You haven't heard any more about it from him because he died on September 11th.

Enron

Fortune magazine's Bethany McLean asked, in a company profile of Enron, "How exactly does Enron make its money? Analysts don't seem to have a clue." This was in January of 2000.

a plumbing day

My friend Bill came over so I could help him fix my plumbing. Well, not really fix it - just make it better.

This old house has had many plumbing work done in the last ninety years. Less than that really, since it didn't have indoor plumbing when it was built. So it has had many changes and additions over the years. There were pipes running everywhere. Strangely, all of the pipes still were connected to the main. They all still had water in them, even though they were dead ends.

Bill came over at 10:30, and finally finished up at 4:30. That was later than he had hoped because he had other things to do, but the job went smoothly. Today we replaced all the cold water feeds. We rerouted the supplies to the water heaters, replaced a lot of galvanized steel pipes with copper, put in some shutoff valves and tore out a lot of just plain excess piping. I didn't actually do any soldering, but I watched closely and he told me all he knew about it, so I think I can do it.

After Bill had left, I talked with Cyn for a while, and then went back down to do some cleanup work. After a little bit I heard a tik tik tik. Something was dripping! Before I got the water turned off it had developed into a spray. So I called Bill back. He wasn't able to come until after 7:00, and it took us four tries and forty five minutes to fix the leak. It was in the middle of a line (and was above the shutoffs), which is kind of difficult to get at. The T coupling that was leaking was right at a joist, so the torch kept setting the joist aflame. We kept saying, "the house is on fire!" That was usually followed by, "the house is out," as one of us would blow it out.

That whole thing was frustrating, but it is nice to have it fixed (and it's not even done yet). It's nice to get (part one of) a major project done.

busy

Yesterday I had my niece's birthday party, shopping for said niece, buying a new mixer for my mom (300 watt Kitchen aid on sale for $160), visiting a friend (who is fixing up her house to sell because she is moving to Arizona soon) and spending the evening with Cyn. So I wasn't online all day. And then today was plumbing day. I had to go to skip100 to get to where I left off.