metachronistic

A month ago, we noticed that our pump was coming on when we weren’t using any water. We immediately suspected the toilet because there was no evidence of water anywhere (on the floor, leaking under the house, etc.), but when we shut off the water supply to the toilet before going to bed, the tank was still full of water in the morning. The gaskets in our kitchen faucet were starting to fail, and it was occasionally leaking down the stem of the faucet, so we replaced the cartridge hoping this would solve our water problem. The faucet works a lot better, but we were still losing water.

We tried turning off the pump at night to confirm we really were losing water, and when we got up in the morning, we had no pressure. The combination of turning off the pump and the toilet supply resulted in no loss in pressure, so the leak was somewhere in the toilet after all. It wasn’t the flapper valve (or the tank would be empty in the morning), and we didn’t see any drips or leaks, so the supply must have been leaking into the top tank somewhere under the water and draining into the bowl where we didn’t notice it.

The obvious fix for this is to replace the stuff in the tank. But the toilet didn’t really work very well anyway, and used the full 1.6 gallons per flush. Andrea installed a dual flush kit that was supposed to use less water for liquid waste, but it didn’t work: the lower “number one” button didn’t release enough water into the bowl for it to actually flush. 1.6 gallons of water doesn’t sound like much, but we’re currently paying 10 cents a gallon for water, so we’re spending more than a dollar a day just to flush the toilet. We have an outhouse, but because we’re so close to Goldstream Creek, it can’t be in the ground and needs to be pumped out whenever it gets full. So our best option was to replace the leaking toilet with something that won’t leak, and uses less than the standard 1.6 gallons of water per flush.

The two current strategies to lowering water consumption in a toilet are to make the top tank smaller so less water is used for every flush, or to implement a dual flush setup where a small amount of water is used for liquids and the full volume flushes solids. Consumer Reports doesn’t give the dual flush models very high ratings, mostly because the bowl isn’t rinsed as well when so little water is used. As a result, we decided to get a toilet that uses a smaller top tank (1.28 gallons per flush). The highest rated model by Consumer Reports is an American Standard one-piece “Cadet 3,” but the local plumbing place and the box stores didn’t have that model in stock. Getting one shipped to Alaska would have taken more than two months. The next place models were the two-piece version of the Cadet 3 and the Kohler Cimarron. Consumer Reports gave the Cimarron slightly higher marks overall, with better bowl cleaning but worse solid waste elimination ratings. While we were in the store, we went to the web site for the company that rates toilets for solid waste elimination (www.map-testing.com) and consulted the latest ratings (from April 4th (!)). The Cimarron was better rated for this statistic (1,000 vs. 800), so that’s what we got.

Installation went smoothly. Thus far, we’re satisfied. What is surprising about the toilet is how fast it flushes. It empties the top tank into the bowl in less than a second, and the bowl empties almost immediately after that. It seems that the strategy is to dump almost all of the top tank water into the bowl as quickly as possible to eliminate waste, and use the small amount remaining to wash down the bowl. So far so good! We’re saving more than three cents each time we flush, and hopefully we will have many fewer double (and more…) flush events.

Montana 1948 is a book published by Milkweed Editions, a non-profit press that attempts to “nurture and publish transformative literature.” I’m not sure what that means, but this is the second Milkweed National Fiction Award winner that I’ve read (The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck is the other). It’s a short little book told from the first person perspective of an adult recounting events that happened when he was twelve. It’s a simple story about family, small towns, and how each of the characters react to acts of violence against Native Americans in their community.

The main character maintains some distance from the events that take place—“I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn’t feel within it.”—and so he allows the reader to draw their own conclusions about what drives the other characters to do what they do. The author is very good at evoking the feel of the time and place of the story. An enjoyable read.

It’s a good looking book too, with a slightly shorter and wider page size than is typical, and a nice thick shiny cover. It’s typeset in Perpetua, which is a font I like, but I felt like the italics were too small for the body text (see the image below). I’m not sure how this would happen unless it’s an intentional feature of the font set. It looked funny to me.

Thus far in 2011 I’ve read three books. I finished Paul Auster’s Invisible, and read Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe on New Year’s Day. I read a few raves of the Auster book, and I’d put it in a very long list of his better books. Maybe not in the top five, but one not to miss if you like his writing. Girl Factory was excellent. After I finished it, I wrote to myself: “Highly entertaining, and the main character had a great voice. New favorite book of 2011, one day into it.” Two weeks later and I’ll stick to that opinion.

The book I just finished, while watching the Bears thrash the Seahawks, was Tana French’s Faithful Place. I can’t remember why I picked it up, but I probably should have known by the style of the dust jacket that it wouldn’t be quite my taste. It’s in the crime genre, and was a little too filled with the stock and trade of that category for me. Even so, the characters are spectacularly well fleshed out, and the sense of place was great. I don’t know anything about the lower class rowhouses of Dublin where the action takes place, but I had no trouble filling the blanks from her detailed descriptions.

Anyway, it wasn’t really my thing, but if you enjoy literate crime fiction, this is a book I can recommend.

I took Friday off from work and brewed my first batch of beer in quite a long time. It’s a brown porter named Crazy Kittens Porter. As should be obvious, it’s named after our three crazy kittens Caslon, Tallys and Jenson, pictured on the right. This time around I developed the recipe using the BrewPal iPhone app, trusting all the measurements and temperatures to the app. We’ll see how well it does. My favorite part of the app is the “style” tab, which shows you what styles your recipe conforms to and to what degree.

Normally I do everything out in the red cabin, but I had the wood stove cranking so I heated the strike and spare water on the wood stove and drained the mash in the kitchen (shown below). It was nice to be able to do that stuff in the house and to avoid burning fossil fuels for the wort production. As usual, I boiled and chilled the wort outside and set the fermenter in the old fridge out in the red cabin. It’s bubbling away now.

I plan to brew another batch of Devil Dog on top of the yeast cake from this batch. This is an excellent way to save some money on yeast, and the second batch normally gets a very explosive start from the massive population of healthy yeast.

We finally agreed on some names for our kittens: Tallys is the small black kitten, Jenson is gray and white and Caslon is the larger of the two black boys. They’re all serif fonts, as Andrea says, “because they’ve got tails!” We struggled for a long time with different naming schemes, but both of us really liked Tallys and Jenson as names, and once we’d gotten those two it was just a question of finding a third font that was appropriate. Caslon is one of my favorite fonts (it’s the typeface used for the body text in The New Yorker), and I think it fits well with the other two.

The kittens are still living in the bedroom but this weekend I fenced in the area at the top of the stairs and came up with a setup that should allow us to leave the bedroom door open and give them a little more room. This way we can slowly expand their range upstairs by opening the doors to the other rooms before letting them downstairs. There’s always a chance they will figure a way around my cat-catchers, or that they’ll jump off the balcony railing, but so far we’re only letting them out when we’re home so we can keep an eye out. The biggest problem with this plan is that the dogs can see the kittens at the top of the stairs and as a result, they’re staring and whining at them. Hopefully this behavior will stop in the near future.