yeah. the pressure knocked the valve off. wrench fixed it. for now, anyways. hey, tearing the pipes up is neither trivial nor cheap. but the idea that it was the pressure got through, at least. this is good.

so, things are back to being idyllic in my little basement hideaway, here...

now that i understand the plumbing a bit better, i'll have to be a bit more aggressive. that (and any pipe damage) could have been prevented by unclogging the clog when i first saw it. but i just didn't understand the system. it was just a basic empirical "if rain, then slow drain. should report issue.". which is what i did and should have done. it was really the "rainwater cannot cause slow drains" response that really cost him his pipes, if there's damage....

there may be an upside to it.

the roaches are in the subfloor somewhere. the only one i've seen since may has been out in the laundry area. it's a good guess that their nest was where the flooding was. if i'm lucky, it drowned the bulk of them and washed away a lot of eggs when it flowed through.

it's ok, i'm used to this.

there was a meme in my group of friends when i was in high school. "fuck. shoulda listened to j.".

as applied seriously:

i failed my french assignment because the teacher said i didn't understand the question. it's actually what j said. fuck. shoulda listened to j.

as applied ironically:

it's raining and i forgot my umbrella. fuck. shoulda listened to j.

(in such ironic usage, j would not have offered an opinion on the umbrella, and would probably not even be present.)

there were other usages. but there's a point. shoulda listened to j!

the question that wasn't asked and makes all the difference in the world...

does the white house control the pentagon, or does the pentagon control the white house?

i know there's some rules on some old piece of paper nobody takes seriously, i'm talking about the actual fact of it. because it's easy to see that if the pentagon controls the whitehouse then the elections don't matter in terms of foreign policy direction. the civil service just keeps plugging from one administration to the next.

consider this: when was the last time a president truly altered foreign policy? through the course of my life time, at least, it's been one after the other with an identical set of policies on every important issue that exists.

i think if they took the whole thing, the lions would respond differently.

what this is demonstrating is that lions know how to share. and that's known.