Uke Therapy

23skidoo

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It's been a rough couple of days in Casa Del Ventitres.

My house was built by an idiot man child - a fact we didn't realize until we'd live here a few years and things started needing fixing. I'm a real DIY kind of guy - would rather spend the money on tools and learn how to do it myself.... end up saving money in the long run and have the satisfaction that goes along with self-sufficiency. Outside of heavy duty electrical issues, I'll pretty much wade into anything.

And then the sewage ejector pump in our finished basement failed. Despite the fact that the main sewage line is gravity fed, the guy that built our house had everything - upstairs and down, all sinks, toilets, dishwasher, laundry - drain into a 150 gallon sump where it is then pumped up almost 10 feet to the sewage outlet. I caught it when a drain backed up and kept the mess to a minimum. To make a long story short, we've had a week of off-again on-again sewage ejection coupled with multiple trips from the plumber, the county water folks..... a nightmare. The highlight of this journey is me with a 16 gallon wet-vac emptying this 150 gallon pit three different times so my family could bathe, flush toilets, etc. and trying to figure out what to do with hundreds of gallons of raw sewage. We also had house guests during this interval. It's been a long week.

I learned a lot and saved a great deal of money by doing most of the work myself. But it was depressing - not only me and the multiple professionals involved not being able to figure it out, but the reality of having to deal with all of the material the pump wasn't dealing with.

My uke was my therapy. I've always played guitar - and it's still my primary instrument - but, tired and nasty, I would wash my hands and sit on the porch with my uke. It's so easy and happy. I'm rediscovering songs I've known for years - and discovering new ones, things I would never play on guitar. It's just great - and this forum is part of that, too.

I'm glad I got it and glad I found this forum.
 
I don't even want to begin to go into the last 5 1/2 years in any kind of depth. Too much that is too difficult to explain - too many things I'd prefer to forget.

We had a water incident back then that you may have heard of in South Louisiana. I started our little Southcoast enterprise during our exile. After sneaking back home off and on over the first few weeks to see what had happened, and then to clean up debris, I got stir crazy in the Baton Rouge motel - we weren't officially allowed back in the city for over two months - so I went back down to my second home in Central America. Looking for something to do with my friends in the place I had lived for nearly a decade, I found the prospects were not that good in my old line of furniture design and manufacture.

I had another friend there, a luthier, Don Omar Corrales, and Southcoast was really started then as pure therapy - something to take my mind off the rebuilding. With any luck, I'll put the finishing touches on our house this summer - it's been a long haul, but we are much, much luckier than a lot of our neighbors.

23skidoo explains it so well, and I probably would have never posted anything like this without reading what he said:

I would wash my hands and sit on the porch with my uke. It's so easy and happy. I'm rediscovering songs I've known for years - and discovering new ones... It's just great - and this forum is part of that, too.

I'm glad I got it and glad I found this forum
 
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Sorry to hear about the troubles, glad you "Got Uke". No offense but I can't resist. Sh*t happens; the trick as 23skidoo and SCU have the wisdom to know is to not take it personally. Everybody poops, including Mother Nature and God. My horseshoer was my medicine man, and even when he was fighting pancreatic cancer and beating it in the short term, he would say "God's "fertilizing" me again, it must be time for me to do some more growing".

I usually am unhappy with the "growth" when it is happening. I work on not taking it as personally by being really grateful that I am still here to grow. It's no dang fun at the time, but I always hope I will be stronger and wiser for it if I make it through. Sometimes we will emerge with a new gift or talent, or a wryer sense of humor. Sometimes it is just loss and attrition, but that's life in a nutshell; we are all dying from the moment we are born even as we are living our lives.

Part of what gets me through the crap is understanding that the calm between the storms is not the norm, like we think it is supposed to be; sometimes it's just the calm eye of the hurricane that can be life as we know it.

The great thing about the uke is it's small, portable, personal, and healing for a lot of people, and it's great at keeping one in the moment, which is where we really live.
 
OH MY GOD...
My house was built in 1951 and it always has sewer issues. In fact, it always backs up in the same two spots, and I can tell which by turning my wrench on to the cleanout in front of the house.
Lately it has been the under the house clean out the needed attention, in fact, four times since my wife switched to "green" tp, and stopped using anything not green as a detergent (don't tell her- she is so proud)...scenario is that I get to go under the house with the black widows and turn the cleanout...which often results in GALLONS of whatever is in there flooding me out . Then I get to lay in it and snake it out.
A fantastic day in my book...but my Martin is the worse for the wear. For some reason after I shower and pour myself a cocktail (these events need a cocktail finish), I go for the Martin, and she is now missing a significant bit of her finish where I strum. I figure if after 70 years she is being played, and played as therapy...it will simply prolong me re-doing all my plumbing (sigh).
Best story is the night a pipe burst at midnight and was fixed by 12:10....Kryptonite on that one (and the Martin took a beating).
Teek- words of wisdom laid down by the medicine man, he must have been something.
 
TCK, you rock dude! :cool:

I forgot to add I'm living in a circa 1930s-40 row house built for Douglas Aircraft employees. The house is sliding towards the southwest corner of the bay 2 1/2 miles away, there is no hot water in the bathroom sink, which even with a half sinkfull at a time of drano will not stay clear for more than 6 weeks. The toilet will back up in the middle of the night and noticing the change in air pressure against one's ass at say 4am in time to reach around to frantically grab the shutoff valve, no fun. The water pressure goes from a general medium to low flow for the entire middle of the day. There is one parking spot for three houses, the rest is hope you get lucky permit street parking.

The floors also all slope to that southwest corner, a marble spun in the hallway will undulate over the dips in the flooring over the joists(?) and speed madly across the second bedroom floor (all scuffed and painted hardwood) to hit the wall. We have rats nesting in various parts of the attic digging and literally having rat races at all hours, making the dog growl, and after the last one we trapped thumped around for a day injured, when we climbed up to get her and she looked up at us with bottomless shining black eyes, fearless and open to whatever decision we would make regarding ending her broken life, we can't bear to put more traps up there.

And we live in a west coast paradise, lol.

We love it. :D
 
Wow, keep on playing folks and I hope those troubles go away some time soon. The thing about the uke is that it's such a happy-sounding instrument. There really is such a thing as uke therapy -- oughta be a song maybe think of 12 bar blues

My plumbings backed up, de dah de dah
pipes too damn old, de dah de dah
got under the house, de dah de dah
and got crapped on by the bowl

Yes I'm a home owner
a home owner
got a repair list by the door
pipe grease tubes bought
by the score

I'm a home owner
with no refinancing in sight

Well that's the best I could do in a few minutes <g> but maybe you'll get a laugh out of it.





"pick up a uke and strum your troubles away"
 
And then the sewage ejector pump in our finished basement failed....
We have a house built on bedrock, which is about 3.5-4 feet under the surface, so it sits high with little drainage into the surrounding soil. Outflow pipes from the house run just below the first floor, so we have gravity feed for waste water and sewage. However...

We have a sump pump in the basement below that level. It pushes water up about 8 feet into the feeder line for the waste water outlet. Problem is that, without a backflow valve, 2/3 of the water falls back into the sump every time. When we have heavy rains, we've sometimes had to manually bail out the sump to keep the water from overflowing into the basement. We have to take the water from the sump outside past the drainage holes by the garage, otherwise we're just dumping it back into the sump. Fun thing to do in the pouring rain.

Our garage is under our living room. In a heavy rain, the water rushes down the driveway towards the garage and pools at two inadequately-sized drainage holes. Pretty soon, the water is 6 inches deep and coming in under the transom of the basement door. Been outside bailing, throwing water up about 3-4 feet, and over the garden, to try to relieve the flooding. Fairly tiring exercise.

I get a lot of uke therapy after heavy thunderstorms. We should write a song about amateur home builders...
 
Thanks for the empathy everyone.... ian, teek, tck - old home owners unite! I agree with gary and ian - there is a song in this.... gary's "Sewage Pump Blues" is a good start.... Dirk - I have a lot of family in SE Arkansas & northern LA, up in the Delta mostly - I know how bad it must have been down on the coast..... I've only had my uke a couple of months, but I am quickly realizing the proverbial 'healing power of music' is increased exponentially by the joyous nature of the ukulele.... as MM Stan is always saying, 'keep on strumming'......
 
Oh - Ian - putting a check valve in that vertical outlet pipe is easy-cheesy. Materials, less than fifteen dollars and all you need is a hacksaw and a wrench.....
 
Oh - Ian - putting a check valve in that vertical outlet pipe is easy-cheesy. Materials, less than fifteen dollars and all you need is a hacksaw and a wrench.....
I have the valve, the hacksaw and the PVC glue - but a better builder warned me against it, suggesting if it gets stuck closed, the problems would be much worse... but if I could pressure-fit the valve, and contain any leaks, it might work... that way I could at least pull it apart if it stuck... hmmm. Another chorus of the Ode to the Home Builder is needed here...
If your valve is stuck,
You're outta luck
.....
 
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