{"id":5918,"date":"2015-10-16T20:01:41","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T00:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=5918"},"modified":"2019-05-15T13:48:36","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:48:36","slug":"the-plumbers-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=5918","title":{"rendered":"The plumber’s daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most\u00a0folks do not look forward to a discussion about septic tanks, I’m told.<\/p>\n

I do, though.<\/p>\n

We had a local construction guy, Chris, out to the cabin today, to look over our septic and water supply situation, and I anticipated it with a kind of glee.<\/p>\n

Toilets, gas lines, water lines, furnaces, AC, gray water, black water, it’s all good. I love\u00a0learning about plumbing, construction and everything related to it. Every time we have a repair guy to the house,\u00a0I’m right there in the utility room watching him and asking questions.<\/p>\n

It’s like being a kid again with Dad on the job. I used to tag along with him on the weekend sometimes and he’d take me to a construction site, show me the skeleton of a building where he was putting in all the veins – the pipes and ducts.<\/p>\n

He explained how one part worked with the others, showed me the different materials they used, talked about how they’d figured things out because every construction site was a different set of problems. It was like a gigantic puzzle.<\/p>\n

A career as a plumber wasn’t really\u00a0an option for me as a girl in the ’60s, and besides, I was expected to go to college. Becoming a journalist was a pretty good choice, as it turned out, because\u00a0I never outgrew my love of poking around, tinkering, and solving problems. Just like Dad.<\/p>\n

And so I looked forward to meeting Chris. A good construction guy is a busy guy, but I’d finally worked out a time for Chris to come out to the cabin while Tom and I were there.<\/p>\n

I liked Chris on the phone, but even more when he stepped out of his truck.<\/p>\n

He is a North Georgia classic: a football player of a guy with a beefy handshake, the kind of\u00a0easy smile that always gets\u00a0a smile\u00a0in return, and an accent like honey over cornbread.<\/p>\n

He listened closely while we walked him around, took in everything. You could watch his brain working through the problem with every step across our tangled land and water.<\/p>\n

We kicked around the ideas\u00a0– compost toilet,\u00a0building a new septic system, making a settling tank to get the sediment out of the gravity-fed water supply. Chris\u00a0liked talking about it, responded with common sense to our layman’s solutions, and didn’t try to puff up his expertise as a defense to\u00a0the\u00a0barrage of questions.<\/p>\n

Just like Dad.<\/p>\n

I could have gabbed with\u00a0him all afternoon, but I knew he had someplace else to be, so reluctantly we let him go on with his day.<\/p>\n

Besides, I had to get to work on fixing the refrigerator.<\/p>\n

Day 103’s penny is a 2014, the year that the cabin’s water sedimentation\u00a0started giving us problems.<\/p>\n

\"Day<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most\u00a0folks do not look forward to a discussion about septic tanks, I’m told. I do, though. We had a local construction guy, Chris, out to the cabin today, to look over our septic and water supply situation, and I anticipated it with a kind of glee. Toilets, gas lines, water lines, furnaces, AC, gray water, … read more The plumber’s daughter<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[36,220,375,8,374,376,377,145],"class_list":["post-5918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inheritance","tag-36","tag-booger-hollow","tag-construction","tag-dad","tag-plumbing","tag-problems","tag-septic","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5918"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5938,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5918\/revisions\/5938"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}