Rants and Rambles

Yakov Smirnoff

Russian reversal or “In Soviet Russia” is a type of joke originated by Smirnoff, and is an example of antimetabole. The general form of the “In Soviet Russia” joke is that the subject and objects of a statement are reversed, and “In (Soviet) Russia”, or something equivalent, is added. For example:

In America, you catch a cold.

In Russia, cold catches you.

To add insult to injury, I woke up Thursday morning to find that I had no water. With all that’s going on with my chemo for the lymphoma, from flushing and washing to drinking; water is something that is in heavy demand around here.

OK, call the city and… NOPE, I’m on a well. Actually it’s even a little more complicated than that. I have a well; it pumps into a storage tank of about 2200 gallons. It has a pump that then pumps the water to the house.

Now I have pressure drops from time to time; there’s a “whole house” filter that periodically gets clogged up. That’s a gradual thing that can be confirmed with the turn of the bypass valve (just for a test, I don’t want the sediment getting into the plumbing if it can be avoided). Made no difference this time.

Then there’s the pressure switch on the pump at the tank. If there’s been a power outage long enough for the pressure to bleed off that switch needs to be manually activated to get the pump to bring the line back up to normal pressure. That didn’t help either. But I could hear the pump in the tank. Loudly. Too loud in fact. So I made a phone call to the company that installed the tank when I bought the house and they asked the obvious question; “is the tank empty?” So I took off the access cover and it sure was! They told me they’d try to get someone out to check things but might not make it until Friday. In the meantime I could call a couple of companies that deliver water, and by refilling the tank I’d be good for a while. So a couple of calls and messages left and I’m set to wait impatiently while an over-active imagination ran wild with fears of a dry well and paying for water by the stainless steel tank truck load.

As bad as this could have been, it really worked out fairly well (sorry, I’ve caught myself with that pun a few times since this started).

• The water delivery happened that afternoon. If I’d missed that window, maybe not until next week.
• The water system company showed up mid-day and checked the wiring. Confirmed the problem, which looked like a dead pump motor, was below the well head.
• They could return with their boom truck and pull the pump that afternoon.
• As they pulled the pipes out, it dumped water so the well wasn’t dry.
• The wires were good.
• They had a pump the matching size.

By 6:00 the biggest problem (other than eventually having to pay off the bill) was having to go buy some new filters since a lot of sediment was stirred up, and I had just used my last one last month. The only, open, local store that carried the filters hadn’t had them on their shelf the last 3 times I’d looked for them. But I tried anyway and they had a number in stock (I bought 8 while I was at it).

So today the house is just a little “newer” than before.