Success means many things

byUltimateless

3.3K followers

7 years ago

So there I was minding my own business (literally) and then I get this request from my partner. Well I call it a request other's might call it a demand.

"We are going to Laggan (don't ask!) and helping our friends set up their sculpture exhibition. (Here it is Rick (cosmicradio), the post you have been waiting for.) You will need to take a few days off".

This is amongst the billion and thirty one other tasks I need to complete. Oh well I thought it will give me a break from my hum drum life (I'm sorry but I wish I had a hum drum life sometimes, but it is not to be, not in this life anyway...there is another story in there somewhere...)

So a few weekends ago (after I have been challenged to 30 days of posting - crazy right?) we trot down to Laggan. There we are met by our very good friends (I won't put their names here as I do not have their permission) and offered excellent accomodation and great food!

We are taken on a guided tour of their property and it is looking great! So I am ready to head off home thinking everything looked perfect, I didn't want to mess up their pristine gardens, pathways and alcoves.

Then the list comes out, this is on a large white board in black ink. Every task needing to be done (I am sure things were being added while my attention wondered, but I didn't want to say anything) and being the handyman that I am I get to fix things.

Water pump! In front of the house they have this beautiful black stone sculpture in the middle of a rectangular pond, put in by a local plumber/builder. The water pump does not work and there are meant to be four water jets cascading onto the feature sculpture.

Luckily they have been given another working pump to replace the defective pump.

My first job is to pull the electrical wiring out through the conduit and pull the 'new pump's' wiring through. Easy enough and I reconnect the water pipes. That should be it shouldn't it?

The water jets apart from not going in the direction of the sculpture were so weak they would have needed crutches to reach their destination. This is where the fun begins.

The pipes to each of the water jets (4) are curved and will not lie flat. The pond does not have a square bottom so even if the pipes were straight they couldn't lie on the bottom of the pond. This is the cruncher! The reason the other pump stopped working, in my humble opinion, is because it had no water filter and neither did the newer pump.

I won't bore you with all the details, oh, okay, I will then. If you don't have a filter on a pump all the crapola that the pump sucks up destroys the motor eventually, and then the crapola clogs up all the pipes so water does not flow and then the pump struggles to work leading to a total meltdown (of course it won't meltdown in a pond, I knew that!).

So I flush out all the pipes (this is really riveting reading isn't it? If you feel the need to go to bed, please don't let me stop you. You will have better dreams, I promise you) then I clean the jets with wire, reassemble the whole shebang and voila, it works like a miracle!

But...I need to make a filter otherwise what I said previously will happen to this pump. Taking a big plastic milk bottle, I cut off the bottom. Over this I stretch, some kindly donated, nylon stockings. The mouth of the bottle I fix to the pump via some found tubing (we are spending big here) and I submerge the whole lot into the pond.

This job takes most of the day. Aiming the jets was the hardest part. I think I will need to redo the whole job because it is not up to my standard. Task one competed! Success!

Go out and treat all of your friends to a bit of you...