OK, a little cynicism, a little hope: That 14-year old "abducted" in Salt Lake City? The real story... (I hope) is that she and her 16-year-old boy friend browbeat her adoring (and adorable) little sister into telling a story. Tomorrow night, the young couple will be found penniless and hungry, sleeping in his rattletrap out-of-gas car somewhere on the road to Las Vegas. That's the way I want it to happen, and I pretty much believe it. Pretty holey story. Ran all day today again, as usual. Tomorrow I'm on the consol, sitting down all day, I think that I'll like it for a change. I went to Walgreens after work and got a few scripts and then to the hardware store to get some acid for the drain. Put the acid in, waited thirty minutes. Nothing. An hour. Nothing. Karen and I ordered some pizza, the good kind, Pizza Hut, the original thin crust supreme. Love it. Ate pizza, went down to check the drain. Heh, some progress... I was able to advance a snake about a foot laterally, it's starting to work. It's been an hour or so since I checked it, I need to go back down there again. In the meantime... I had forgotten to mention the gullywasher thunderstorms we got yesterday. We got about three inches of rain, but none got in the basement, thanx to JD and Tyler digging the french drain a coupla years ago. Power was lost also, but only momentarily, not enough to shut down the computers. But there was evidently a surge... my 12-hole network switch is blown. I had thought that I would hook it up to one of the UPS boxes, but I never got around to it. Luckily, I had a 4-port one waiting in the basement for my Linux cluster... heh. Me with a Linux cluster. Heh heh. Just went down to check on the buried line, it seems to be making progress. However, tomorrow I will go out and buy the supplies to re-do the stack. I talked quite extensively to a fellow at work today who gave me some good ideas. What I'm gonna have to do, either immediately or eventually, is cut a section of the cast-iron stack out and replace it with a plastic section with a coupla two-inch inputs held together with rubber grommets. Yeah, that sounds pretty rinky-dink, but it meets code here in Topeka. The only thing that I really need to worry about it making sure that the upper part is well-supported before I cut a section out. I have to use a carborundum blade in my skill saw to cut the cast iron, I didn't know that would work, but I've been assured that it will. So anyway, when I get finished, I'll have no worries except for the sewer line itself. And I'll worry about that damned thing until I have it replaced. And I'm not gonna replace it until I really, really have to. Unless I come across a bunch of money. Working in the basement has made me come to the realization that the basement really needs to be cleaned out. Much of the stuff I have down there I'll probably never use unless I had a shop, and I'll probably never have a shop, so it's just junk... lots and lots of junk. Mostly pretty neat junk, but junk nonetheless. Dammit, you don't know how much it hurts me to say that.... So, again it's just moved right along to bedtime here in Topeka. That includes me, heh.