Drip drip drip

My kitchen sink was a mess.  One day I found a bit of moisture in my recycle container and I thought that it must have been a beer that was tossed in there partly full.  That didn't entirely make sense, and something twigged in my mind, but I decided to ignore it.  The next day the bag was soaked and I discovered the whole under sink area was wet.  I ran my fingers along the pipe under the sink and then felt a sickening crunch under my fingers, and I knew it was going to be a right mess.

Pipes aren't supposed to go crunch under the lightest of touches.

For a couple of days we just put a bucket under the sink and the water blasted right into the bucket when we sent it down the drain.  It gave me a great appreciation for just how much water we use, and how much of a pain in the ass it is to get rid of wastewater by hand.  Modern plumbing is amazing, yo.

Eventually my parents came to visit and my dad, being a master of fixing all things, helped me rebuild the underside of my sink.  Normally I would say that I helped him, but he got me to do all the work while he watched and instructed.  My sink won't break again for another twenty years probably, but if it does I will know what to do about it!  It is all pretty plastic instead of copper, which is the style these days, or so my dad says.  I remember doing this sort of thing many a time when I was young, and I guess some of those lessons stuck.

Some certainly didn't, obviously, because I am a city boy now.

It amazed me to see the extent of the damage after I removed the pipe.  It was just destroyed.  I guess it was holding on, right at the very edge of total failure, and finally the water seal gave way and the entire thing fell to pieces.  It makes me appreciate the city infrastructure that is often a full 100 years old and which still manages to mostly work somehow, getting water to my home and taking it away again.

I suppose there is a lot of that in our world.  Everything around us is slowly falling apart, and when we finally notice an issue and look at it we find it is an absolute wreck, everything about it on the edge of total catastrophe.