* - When I first got to Phoenix in '07, pickup continued unabated through the hottest months of the summer with 20-30 strong every week. We've been lucky to have twelve to fourteen lately, and more often it's been in the ten, eight, six range. Not good. I tried food promotions (chicken wings for layouts!), moving the fields, moving it later... nothing. I finally gave up, as driving twenty miles for three on three is not worth it at ALL, especially if you have to change fields because of irrigation or what have you. This past Sunday, I didn't go, as mentioned, but heard reports that only three showed up. Screw that. It's off until September, and I'm left wondering what happened - pickup is really a cornerstone of an Ultimate community, and without it, we're hardly going to improve the mediocre level of play in Phoenix. So it goes, I suppose.
Pay no attention to the utter chaos of home design behind the pipes; that's the um, "lo-fi" work of the previous homeowner. I was guessing that the clog was at the bottom of the U-pipe, and I did the obvious easy thing, which was run to the store, buy some Liquid Plumber and pour it down the left sink, hoping this would be a relatively tame problem. No dice, natch; after fifteen-to-twenty minutes of LP-soaking, the drains cleared, but as soon as I poured water down, we were back to sink flood. So it was a "most stubborn clog," and hey, right there on the bottle: "For the most stubborn clogs, use half the bottle." In retrospect, I probably should have been suspicious of a corporate instruction of "in case our product doesn't work, use more of it," but I wasn't entirely in the mood to disassemble pipes, so I followed directions. Another twenty minutes, and more nothing; sink still clogged. Ruh-roh.
I've never disassembled pipes before, and it's one of those things that strikes fear for all the usual visions-of-flooded-kitchen reasons. But plumber calls are ridiculously expensive, I had some time ... what the hey. I busted out the industrial sized wrench and went to town, which more of an endeavor than it might seem - parts of our sink are brand new-ish, parts are seemingly the original house pipes, so figuring out which joints to take apart and how was a trial. Details spared, but this was some high effort in tight spaces and invloved after-the-fact debriding of the pipe's screw-threads of years and years of deposits. It was, as you can guess, disgusting. But I got the whole u-pipe segment off, and cleaned/scrubbed it out, only to discover that it really was patent - the clog was lower than that.
My first clue probably should have been that when I took the u-pipe off, there was still water pouring out* from the section of pipe distal to the u-pipe. This is one-oh-one stuff, but remember, I'm a theoretical academician who doesn't deal in the realm of the real. So I thought that maybe I didn't have a most-stubborn-clog, maybe I just had one that was distal to the U and so none of the LP had actually gotten to it (gravity and density of LP only doing so much work).
* - Yeah, nor any drop to drink of black food-clouded disgustingness throughout this entire process. I had a bucket to catch it, of course, but this was not, shall we say, a sterile environment. BLEK.
So I tried the LP again, this time pouring it directly into the distal pipe which you can see up there running away from the camera toward the back wall. Twenty minutes. Again, no dice. I shined a flashlight into the pipe and could more or less tell that the pipe was clear (except for the black nastiness). So the clog was back by that joint at the wall and down into the main, big pipe running underneath the house (that pipe is obscured by the bleach bottle in the shot above). Hmmm...
Trip to Home Depot, auger bought, and I came home and spent the next two hours in Herculean task. At first I mainly just managed to pull LP back up with the auger, which was, yep, even more disgusting. I started to get worried, because at this point there was no more disassembling to be done; the joint at the wall, as far as I could tell, was completely inaccessible by human* means. So it was now or plumber. I worked and worked the auger, struggling mightily because there just wasn't a ton space and guiding the stiff wire around a Z pipe joint was tres difficult. Hopelessness started to set in...
* - Monkey means**, maybe. We're talking a very small crawl space with pipes abutting one another; I can't envision how they installed this, let alone how one would take it apart. It's like the pipes were there and they built the house around them.
** - Speaking of monkey means, is there any fruit that you can eat that will make you feel more like a monkey than a mango? The words "eager monkey" traipse through my head every time I've cut one open these past two weeks. And yes, that means no fewer than eight times. I'm gonna be a genius anyway.
And voila - the last twirl dislodged... I don't know what. "Gelatinous mass," let's call it. Dinosaur artery plaque. I suppose it could have been eggs or congealed fat or who knows what, but it broke up and came out in a thousand vomitous blobs. Problem solved! Huzzah for us!
Problem one, it turned out. Because now the pipes were disassembled. And again, I am well qualified to ponder, say, pipe functionality as a categorical heuristic or whatever, but these practical matters are typically beyond me. Still, I pressed on, reassembled the now clean joints, tightened every washer and bolt and clamp and, in short, put the now hopefully eggless Humpty Dumpty back together again. And I put the bucket back in place, and I ran the sink, slowly at first, then with more volume/sec...
And everything drained, and no liquid leaked. Huzzah.
And though it took a ridiculous amount of time - six hours, with trips to the stores and cleaning included - I avoided a plumber call with time to fix myself a Linner and get ready for practice that night. The agenda was to clean our O up - a definite most stubborn clogging - with a split squad practice* of handlers on one side of the field and cutters on the other. We started off together with the typical warm-up and a drill that involved cutting at the back of the mark and having the handler throw the disc out to space .. turns out this is a skill we lack entirely. Some really ugly, ugly throws by pretty much everybody involved served as a nice reminder that there is plenty-o-work to do.
* - This reminded me quite thoroughly of high school football and our splits of offense and defense that generated non only rivalries but a lot of bickering back and forth. One, it would be an interesting athleticism v. hands matchup if we completely separated the two kinds of players on Sprawl, though I would have to bet that the cutters would win. And two, it seems that Ultimate is similar to HS football in that relatively way more running than the other. In football, the D typically claimed to have way tougher practices than the O; I'll let you guess which group was which on Monday night...
Anyhoo, nothing terribly exciting to report other than that we did the split, and our handlers had a solid forty-five to work on communicating and generally getting on the same page. I think it helped. Afterwards we ran a modified scrimmage in which I set up additional cones that created eight yard lanes on the lateral edges of the field. In these lanes, the stall count was 5, whereas it was 10 everywhere else as normal (the idea being to train the offense by rule to keep it away from the sideline / have the offense get it away from the sideline quickly should it end up there / have the defense push it toward the sidelines). it worked pretty well, and made for some good competition. I didn't play particularly well in moments - I shanked a not-warmed-up-enough-huck, threw a perfect IO forehand to Dixon right as he cut the opposite way, and dropped a disc to end the game that I lost in the lights - but I made up for it with some others, and things did seem a little crisper than typical. So a good night for the Ballers. We've got a weekend retreat in Flag coming up, and Co Cup is a scant two weeks away now. So things are progressing nicely, if a bit haltingly - I just found out that another player will be unavailable for regionals, so it seems we'll have to adjust the roster yet again. And Ian sprained his MCL at Potlatch last weekend, so there's yet another hiccup.
No one said it would be easy. But between the two "plumbing repairs" of Monday, it was a fairly decent day...
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