A Blog About Green Livin' and Raisin' Chicks in Arizona

Is it bad that sometimes I look forward to disasters because then I get to blog about it?!

My husband is off looking through the “Pope Scope” (The vatican’s observatory here in Arizona), Lilly and I were headed to the feed store to get food for the chickens and what do I see? A massive spray of water coming from the pole-barn’s water pipe. CRAP!

This leaves it up to me and Lilly to fix. Well, just me.

Got Lilly loaded into the car to stay warm first and then I went to investigate.  So I went out to it, slushing through a bunch of mud and when I went to twist the faucet handle it flew right off the wall and the “spray” turned into a full on fire-hose effect, spraying water all the way into the center of our round-pen.

Uh  oh.

Luckily, we’ve been through this before so I drove down to the end of the road and turned off the main water supply. I attempted to wrench off the top faucet so I could run to home depot but the pipe below was twisting along with the faucet and I already know that’s not good, last year we broke off a full pipe trying to do the same thing.  So I stopped and tried to see what tools we had because I was going to need two wrenches at least and I have no idea where my husband stores all his tools. All I had was an adjustable channel lock plier. Craptastic.

So off to Home Depot I went, took the piece that broke off, picked up two pipe wrenches and the store clerk sold me the wrong size ball faucet. Realized that when I got home, and I had put Lilly down for a nap so I had to wake her back up and head back.

Got back home with corrected ball faucet, got that on and got the water completely shut off at that faucet. Phew. This let me turn the water on back to the house at least!  However, still don’t have the right part that I need to complete the job but realized I might be able to salvage the neck pipe off the old faucet (above).  There’s no way to turn off the water out to that faucet close to the ground so I went ahead and wrapped the hell out of it with insulation.

But main thing is, I didn’t break the ground pipe thankfully, there’s no running water anymore and I have water to the house.

Number 2 reason to breast-feed your babies… Boobs don’t catch on fire or melt….bottles however can…

I had a bit of a scare this morning! I went out into the livingroom only to smell an odd smell and see a light haze of smoke!!! I went flying into the bedroom yelling “Ray, wake up, RAY!!! WAKE UP!! HELP!!! there’s smoke, there’s SMOKE! I can’t find it, HELP!”

Scared the living crap out of Ray who went flying out of bed to help me find it.

Running through the house we’re checking the lamps, the appliances, the fish tank filter motor and then it hits me… I was running the dishwasher earlier.

I opened it up and what did I find stuck in the bottom of the dishwasher underneath the rack, caught under the rotating blade???

THIS:

SIGH

So mental note… do not put bottles in the lower-rack of a dishwasher… in fact, not sure if you should even have them on the top rack, will have to check the gaps to see if they could “escape” and fall during washing or not from the top rack…

I have the house open and my big fan pulling out the “haze”, and my heart has started to slow down a bit… Ray asked “Can I go finish having a heart attack and then go back to bed?”

Every year, we have a little issue with our air conditioner. And every time, we gripe about it like we don’t expect it to happen even though it notoriously will break down. I was at dinner with friends when Ray texted me to tell me the AC had gone back out and it wasn’t a simple “pop the circuit” problem or over-icing. CRAP!!!

My first gut reaction was to see if I needed to go to walmart and buy a window AC unit. I almost forgot about “Swampy.”

“Swampy” is my old beast of a Swamp Cooler. It’s gotta be around circa 1980, and sometimes I wonder if it’s not more like a late 70′s unit…. Not sure, all I know is it might be beat to sh**, but is there in case of emergency.

UGLY, ISN’T IT?!!!

On the way home from dinner, I remembered that we have the old beast and wondered if we could get it up and running quickly enough till I could locate our ac guy.

Luckily I worked on Swampy all last summer to get him up and running due to our frequent AC outages. I had replaced the filters last year with quick cleanable filters (just a quick hose-down is all it takes), I replaced the floater valve, the water line, oil the bearings (well, that part I had Ray do cuz I wasn’t sure where to put the oil), scrubbed the base (which was filthy again last night) cleaned the internal inlet, etc. etc. etc.

So it only took Ray and I about 10 minutes to hook up the water hose, spray it out the best we could and let the Beast loose. Unfortunately, in those 10 minutes, I got nailed with fire-ants and mosquitoes on my ankles and spent the better part of the night trying to sleep in a now humid house, scratching at my ankles which felt like they were on fire. Yeah, no sleep for the preggo chick.

Swampy is now at least effectively cooling down the living room and my front room, (kinda). I opened up other windows this morning and I’m trying to see how effective it is at pulling through the entire house, not just the front rooms. We’ll see.

It’s definitely cooler, but my body does not know what to do with humidity anymore. I’ve apparently adapted to Arizona too much and lost my “Iowa” roots.  I have to admit it’s pretty sad. When I was growing up, my mom had AC but a lot of my friends didn’t. We used to just use a fan and be completely fine with it, even on 100+ degree days. I am apparently now a WUSS.

So I called our AC guru Mr. Fixit Marcus out. He’s the only AC tech I trust because he does not replace units. It’s his job to fix them, and 90% of the time he usually can fix the problem, unless the compressor is just completely dead. At that point, if he can’t fix it, he tells me up-front and it would be off to an actual AC replacement company to have it fully replaced. It’s in his best interest (and pocketbook) to fix it if it can be done. He’s my first stop when something goes wrong, cuz if he can’t fix it, it means we’re truly screwed.

Swamp coolers are not very effective this time of the year, (They start to lose effectiveness about 30% humidity and we’re at 34%, instead of cooling into the 70′s, it’s supposed to only cool to around 83′ish degrees) but it still does manage to cool things a bit and it’s at least air-movement and enough to keep the animals in a comfortable enough environment till Marcus gets here.

I’m very much hoping he can fix whatever the problem is, since it at least at the surface only appears to be the inside fan blower motor quit.  Being 8 months pregnant with no A/C would be a really really bad thing.

Nora didn’t make it. I went to move her this morning and she had a heart-attack or seizure and died. At least she’s not suffering anymore.

Day 3 now, and Nora seems to have taken another turn but backwards. Not good, not good.

I never ever thought in my life that on a Friday night I would be sitting at the kitchen sink holding a chicken’s hind-quarters down in a warm soapy bath, followed by applying oil to their “vent”…. ewwww.

This is the only thing I really have left to try. She’s behaving like she’s egg-bound (or poop bound), but nothing is coming out.  She’s no longer drinking or eating.

I’m going to let her be for awhile and see if she passes something on her own here, and starts drinking water or at least trying to stand up.  If not, I need to go get an eye-dropper from the store and start giving her water by hand. I picked up a vitamin/electrolyte supplement but can’t get her to drink any water on her own. (She was drinking water fine yesterday)

I have a feeling she’s not going to make it but I’m trying what I can to keep her alive.