Raritan PH II toilet repair. oh, goody
if someone had asked me a few years ago what would be the most troublesome system on a boat i probably would have said wood trim or something like that.
i had no idea. aside from my old engine, the system i spend the most time on is the plumbing! the last few days i've spent replacing hoses under the head sink and rebuilding the toilet. oh, joy.
the hoses under there had been installed for god knows how many years and the hot water line was leaking at a fitting (wrong kind of fitting, to boot). i was just going to replace the offending part but after getting a good look at those hoses i decided to prevent a future disaster adn replce both hoses and the wrong fittings.
that part was easy, but we've also had problems with our toilet. it's an interesting phenomenon: you flush it away, and it within a few minutes it's right back in the bowl again. like musical chairs with pee. out it goes, back it comes, out it goes, back it comes again. i knew something wasn't right about that so steeled myself to ripping it all apart.
i did this when we first bought the boat so i knew what i was in for. as i thought the pump and lines and valves were all crusted with that strange and miraculous hard scale that grows on everything that seawater and piss come in contact with. the real issue was the flapper valve growing a piss scale reef that was preventing it from closing. It took one look at the horrible fungus-like growth and decided i would just replace it.
Hah. it's not available in town and it would take a month to get it in. i went online to see if i could order it myself and found several websites carrying it, but alas, they all used UPS which is a no-no. if you ever want to order something from the US and they offer to send it ups, run the other way. you see, ups has this scam going where they charge you like $50.00 for "brokerage" fees when they bring something across the border. never mind that the thing is only worth ten bucks or that if you mailed it there would be no such fees. last i heard there was a class action suit against them and fedex for this scam (ignore the shipping costs charged by the supplier; this fee is tagged on after it's shipped).
we couldn't go without a crapper for a month so that meant i had to scrape two years of piss scale of the rubber. it was no easy feat and the smell was truly awful, but i eventually got everything de-fouled and to my immense relief it all works.
aside from the smell, another shocking thing is the money they want for parts: it'll set me back just under 50 clams for this valve. i just put a new joker valve in for $35.00. you can buy a whole new toilet for $150.00! something's very wrong with this picture: why would anyone fix one of these things rather than tossing the whole unit out every two years or so; it's a nasty job and hardly saves any money. the pricing of parts encourages a throw-away culture and a perfectly serviceable toilet will get tossed on a dump, and i really couldn't blame a guy for doing just that. something here has to change.
here's a pic of my water hose: this is the cold; the hot water line was much more swollen. it has already been replaced with the new line on the bottom of the pic. I wonder how long either would have lasted? another reason to use a 20 lb cutoff switch for the pressure pump rather than 40 or 60 lb. you can see that the fitting it is attached to is a plumbing fitting not a proper hose barb fitting, and was a source of leaks on the hot water line.
a pic of the jabsco water pump that i replaced the switch on. i'm amazed that it worked as long as it did. spade connectors are a no-no on a boat. you know, we may gripe about all the work we have to do on our boats, but with stuff like this aboard we are lucky they work as well as they do! i replaced the switch for 1/3 the cost of a whole new pump. grrrrrr.
I took care of another chore-waterproofing our canvas. i hate using chemicals and avoid it when i can, but water was starting to leak into the cockpit. i would like to try using some kind of paste like dubbin, but in the meantime i tried a (pricey) 3M product. shop around people, as prices are all over the map for this stuff. surprisingly, a non-marine fabric store had the highest price!
anyway, it works like a hot damn. we had heavy rain last night, and although a gallon of water collected on our canvas not a drop went through.
we ended up with a fair week weather-wise, although it ended with a doozer of storm in the gulf of alaska that sent a swath of rain and wind our way. still, it would have been good sailing if i had been out there. i'm jonesing for a cruise, but i have to go to kelowna this weekend.
www..Self Discovery Sail.com
Jesus was a Loser
The path to happiness is to become a Loser. What society defines as a Loser.
Jesus was a loser, by modern-day definitions. I am not a Christian in terms of adhering to the formal religion, but I do like what I understand about Jesus the man – the original social activist. Although the West is predominantly Christian, it is amazing to me how little the values of the man survives, while his eponymous religion flourishes.
Amazingly enough, if you want to be happy, be like Jesus. “Do what Jesus would do.” Not necessarily for the goal of spiritual salvation in the religious sense, but the secular. The Old Testament tries to terrify people into following the role with threats of eternal torture, but I suggest following his example in terms of secular happiness.
The guy had it figured out.
He didn’t worry about money. I think the whole flogging the bankers out of the temple thing was a metaphor. Chase away money from the temple of your life; it’s a bore and a distraction and inevitably leads to no good.
Here’s a man who lived in a very impoverished period in history, and yet he abandoned a good career to walk around doing what he felt he had to do. The world was almost inconceivably leaner and tougher in those days and yet somehow he managed to stop worrying about his belly. And he survived and even prospered until the politics got excessive. He was persecuted then, just as those who fly against the grain today are persecuted. When you abandon mainstream expectations, when you abandon the economy, you will suddenly discover what a threat you are, that a lot of people are against you.
And yet this man trusted that he would get by somehow, and he did until he was murdered for his dangerous politics. There are many places still in the world where you will suffer the same fate for saying the same things.
Still, people supported him. Friends, family, strangers. There were enough enlightened people around who either saw what he was trying to do and applauded him for it; perhaps they were simply bemused by his choices but were just good people. The people didn’t allow him to starve, and neither will you. Then as now, it is the authorities to keep an eye out for: those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo for their personal benefit.
Jesus obviously followed an internal belief that allowed him this courage. Maybe his stint in the wilderness allowed him to finally decide what was really important and to live according to that. It’s very common for people to extricate themselves from their lives and go off for awhile to figure out what life is about, away from the babble of others who really, really want you to stay the same.
I like to imagine the man was a quiet, thoughtful sort. He must have spent a lot of time in meditation (prayer) to cleanse his mind from the dross of the world and his heart from all the forces trying to pull him back in the fold. He would have known that all the answers he needed were inside him, but that the voice was a quiet one and he would have to be quiet to hear it.
Jesus would have understood that the culture around him was deceptive and inhumane; a trap to his brothers and sisters. In his context it was undoubtedly more blatant and people were coerced and terrorised into good behaviour rather than lead down a gilded path, as the media functions today. But they were also manipulated and fooled and oppressed by those with more social power, and he would have hated that.
He was killed for his enlightenment and compassion and yet while he lived he lived according to his lights. How many of us can say the same?
Jesus had a goal, which was emancipation for the weak. He went around trying to help people and trying to make others care as well. He didn’t just say to hell with the system and lay around on a beach. He threw off a typical, boring but safe life to do something. We all have to do something, it’s part of what makes life meaningful. Because so many of us are slaves to paycheques, and ultimately our lives, we tend to think in terms of escaping from instead of moving towards. We imagine breaking free and lying in a hammock on some tropical and ideal “otherwhere”.
That’s all fine and good but sooner or later you will become bored because the human spirit has evolved to strive, to reach, and to challenge itself. You may need some time to just get your breath back and learn to listen to your heart instead of the crack of whips but sooner or later your human drive and curiosity will push you back out into the world.
A lot of people will protest that they don’t know what they want to do with their lives; they didn’t have divine intervention of Jesus. Maybe not, but first one has to have the space for exploring to know; you have to dabble, search, move, to find out just what your purpose is. It’s not something you can discover through a battery of personality or aptitude test; it’s by living, and living authentically that your path will emerge. You will know when you are on the path by two phenomena:
• The road will open to you. Being will no longer be such a struggle.
• Money and survival will be irrelevant. All your focus will be on being and being is a verb. The Loser cannot help but manifest themselves. And their poverty won’t matter. To them, they aren’t poor at all. They are following in Jesus’ footsteps and that can only be joyful.
I said that being will no longer be such a struggle. I should clarify that. In many ways your life will involve more struggles and more challenges than before, but they will be vastly different from what you have known. The person who struggles with what they believe are life’s fundamentals such as food and shelter and a new car no doubt feel a great deal of stress over this. Changing their viewpoint to one of unlimited possibilities will take care of that, but what also emerges are far grander, far more profound struggles and questions. Sometimes I think people put themselves in such places in part to avoid worrying about the real questions, the ones that truly matter. Why am I here? What is my ultimate potential? How am I limiting my gifts to humanity?
This is a good point to recollect the words of Marianne Williamson from her 1992 book, "Return to Love" (often misattributed to Nelson Mandela):
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
That’s a pretty tall order, and it’s very easy to see how impossible it is when one’s thoughts are so preoccupied with uncritically accepted ideas of survival and comfort.
When one thinks of the possibilities of a person embodied in these words, it makes the travesty and tragedy of world poverty even more abhorrent. These words apply to every person, every human being is a potential messiah.
Unfortunately, far to many people – in the billions – do struggle for mere survival rather than reaching for these lofty goals. What glorious spirit is wasting away somewhere due to a lack of human basic needs? This in the same world where Canada and the US collectively spend 80 billion dollars on themselves every year at Christmas.
There is not much that we as individuals can do to change this huge and systemic problem although we have to become far more aware of how our personal choices perpetuate it. But it seems to me that as we do not live in such dire circumstances by any measure, we have an obligation to strive for those goals listed in the quote above.
We are all limited. Perhaps few of us will become what we might consider as lights to others. And yet you never know what will happen when you throw off the walls that your fear once constructed around yourself.
I am a very limited person. But I have come to realise my actual, true limitations, and that has given me something authentic to strive against, to become a better person. For many years I wasted so much time building walls against myself - walls that every one of us would easily recognise - and then railing against them. I took on jobs and careers that I hated and then complained and rebelled. And as soon as I left one I went to another and started it all over again. Having given up the perverse game, I see where my walls really are, and they are all inside me. Trust. Fear. Social Anxiety and shyness. Hiding behind intellectualism. And yet I have found a glorious freedom to confront these and spend my time becoming a better human being and being a source of inspiration and comfort to others.
It is an imperfect project and I don’t see a resolution, but that’s looking at it from a winner’s and losers perspective. What matters is spending my life seeking growth and pursuing goals that are deeply and intrinsically meaningful to me. There is and will be no end to this, which is why I say that while “being” will no longer be a struggle, the struggles will in fact escalate. But when the struggle has such profound meaning, when they come from deep inside you, your days will be filled with far more joy and far less pain.
i had no idea. aside from my old engine, the system i spend the most time on is the plumbing! the last few days i've spent replacing hoses under the head sink and rebuilding the toilet. oh, joy.
the hoses under there had been installed for god knows how many years and the hot water line was leaking at a fitting (wrong kind of fitting, to boot). i was just going to replace the offending part but after getting a good look at those hoses i decided to prevent a future disaster adn replce both hoses and the wrong fittings.
that part was easy, but we've also had problems with our toilet. it's an interesting phenomenon: you flush it away, and it within a few minutes it's right back in the bowl again. like musical chairs with pee. out it goes, back it comes, out it goes, back it comes again. i knew something wasn't right about that so steeled myself to ripping it all apart.
i did this when we first bought the boat so i knew what i was in for. as i thought the pump and lines and valves were all crusted with that strange and miraculous hard scale that grows on everything that seawater and piss come in contact with. the real issue was the flapper valve growing a piss scale reef that was preventing it from closing. It took one look at the horrible fungus-like growth and decided i would just replace it.
Hah. it's not available in town and it would take a month to get it in. i went online to see if i could order it myself and found several websites carrying it, but alas, they all used UPS which is a no-no. if you ever want to order something from the US and they offer to send it ups, run the other way. you see, ups has this scam going where they charge you like $50.00 for "brokerage" fees when they bring something across the border. never mind that the thing is only worth ten bucks or that if you mailed it there would be no such fees. last i heard there was a class action suit against them and fedex for this scam (ignore the shipping costs charged by the supplier; this fee is tagged on after it's shipped).
we couldn't go without a crapper for a month so that meant i had to scrape two years of piss scale of the rubber. it was no easy feat and the smell was truly awful, but i eventually got everything de-fouled and to my immense relief it all works.
aside from the smell, another shocking thing is the money they want for parts: it'll set me back just under 50 clams for this valve. i just put a new joker valve in for $35.00. you can buy a whole new toilet for $150.00! something's very wrong with this picture: why would anyone fix one of these things rather than tossing the whole unit out every two years or so; it's a nasty job and hardly saves any money. the pricing of parts encourages a throw-away culture and a perfectly serviceable toilet will get tossed on a dump, and i really couldn't blame a guy for doing just that. something here has to change.
here's a pic of my water hose: this is the cold; the hot water line was much more swollen. it has already been replaced with the new line on the bottom of the pic. I wonder how long either would have lasted? another reason to use a 20 lb cutoff switch for the pressure pump rather than 40 or 60 lb. you can see that the fitting it is attached to is a plumbing fitting not a proper hose barb fitting, and was a source of leaks on the hot water line.
a pic of the jabsco water pump that i replaced the switch on. i'm amazed that it worked as long as it did. spade connectors are a no-no on a boat. you know, we may gripe about all the work we have to do on our boats, but with stuff like this aboard we are lucky they work as well as they do! i replaced the switch for 1/3 the cost of a whole new pump. grrrrrr.
I took care of another chore-waterproofing our canvas. i hate using chemicals and avoid it when i can, but water was starting to leak into the cockpit. i would like to try using some kind of paste like dubbin, but in the meantime i tried a (pricey) 3M product. shop around people, as prices are all over the map for this stuff. surprisingly, a non-marine fabric store had the highest price!
anyway, it works like a hot damn. we had heavy rain last night, and although a gallon of water collected on our canvas not a drop went through.
we ended up with a fair week weather-wise, although it ended with a doozer of storm in the gulf of alaska that sent a swath of rain and wind our way. still, it would have been good sailing if i had been out there. i'm jonesing for a cruise, but i have to go to kelowna this weekend.
www..Self Discovery Sail.com
Jesus was a Loser
The path to happiness is to become a Loser. What society defines as a Loser.
Jesus was a loser, by modern-day definitions. I am not a Christian in terms of adhering to the formal religion, but I do like what I understand about Jesus the man – the original social activist. Although the West is predominantly Christian, it is amazing to me how little the values of the man survives, while his eponymous religion flourishes.
Amazingly enough, if you want to be happy, be like Jesus. “Do what Jesus would do.” Not necessarily for the goal of spiritual salvation in the religious sense, but the secular. The Old Testament tries to terrify people into following the role with threats of eternal torture, but I suggest following his example in terms of secular happiness.
The guy had it figured out.
He didn’t worry about money. I think the whole flogging the bankers out of the temple thing was a metaphor. Chase away money from the temple of your life; it’s a bore and a distraction and inevitably leads to no good.
Here’s a man who lived in a very impoverished period in history, and yet he abandoned a good career to walk around doing what he felt he had to do. The world was almost inconceivably leaner and tougher in those days and yet somehow he managed to stop worrying about his belly. And he survived and even prospered until the politics got excessive. He was persecuted then, just as those who fly against the grain today are persecuted. When you abandon mainstream expectations, when you abandon the economy, you will suddenly discover what a threat you are, that a lot of people are against you.
And yet this man trusted that he would get by somehow, and he did until he was murdered for his dangerous politics. There are many places still in the world where you will suffer the same fate for saying the same things.
Still, people supported him. Friends, family, strangers. There were enough enlightened people around who either saw what he was trying to do and applauded him for it; perhaps they were simply bemused by his choices but were just good people. The people didn’t allow him to starve, and neither will you. Then as now, it is the authorities to keep an eye out for: those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo for their personal benefit.
Jesus obviously followed an internal belief that allowed him this courage. Maybe his stint in the wilderness allowed him to finally decide what was really important and to live according to that. It’s very common for people to extricate themselves from their lives and go off for awhile to figure out what life is about, away from the babble of others who really, really want you to stay the same.
I like to imagine the man was a quiet, thoughtful sort. He must have spent a lot of time in meditation (prayer) to cleanse his mind from the dross of the world and his heart from all the forces trying to pull him back in the fold. He would have known that all the answers he needed were inside him, but that the voice was a quiet one and he would have to be quiet to hear it.
Jesus would have understood that the culture around him was deceptive and inhumane; a trap to his brothers and sisters. In his context it was undoubtedly more blatant and people were coerced and terrorised into good behaviour rather than lead down a gilded path, as the media functions today. But they were also manipulated and fooled and oppressed by those with more social power, and he would have hated that.
He was killed for his enlightenment and compassion and yet while he lived he lived according to his lights. How many of us can say the same?
Jesus had a goal, which was emancipation for the weak. He went around trying to help people and trying to make others care as well. He didn’t just say to hell with the system and lay around on a beach. He threw off a typical, boring but safe life to do something. We all have to do something, it’s part of what makes life meaningful. Because so many of us are slaves to paycheques, and ultimately our lives, we tend to think in terms of escaping from instead of moving towards. We imagine breaking free and lying in a hammock on some tropical and ideal “otherwhere”.
That’s all fine and good but sooner or later you will become bored because the human spirit has evolved to strive, to reach, and to challenge itself. You may need some time to just get your breath back and learn to listen to your heart instead of the crack of whips but sooner or later your human drive and curiosity will push you back out into the world.
A lot of people will protest that they don’t know what they want to do with their lives; they didn’t have divine intervention of Jesus. Maybe not, but first one has to have the space for exploring to know; you have to dabble, search, move, to find out just what your purpose is. It’s not something you can discover through a battery of personality or aptitude test; it’s by living, and living authentically that your path will emerge. You will know when you are on the path by two phenomena:
• The road will open to you. Being will no longer be such a struggle.
• Money and survival will be irrelevant. All your focus will be on being and being is a verb. The Loser cannot help but manifest themselves. And their poverty won’t matter. To them, they aren’t poor at all. They are following in Jesus’ footsteps and that can only be joyful.
I said that being will no longer be such a struggle. I should clarify that. In many ways your life will involve more struggles and more challenges than before, but they will be vastly different from what you have known. The person who struggles with what they believe are life’s fundamentals such as food and shelter and a new car no doubt feel a great deal of stress over this. Changing their viewpoint to one of unlimited possibilities will take care of that, but what also emerges are far grander, far more profound struggles and questions. Sometimes I think people put themselves in such places in part to avoid worrying about the real questions, the ones that truly matter. Why am I here? What is my ultimate potential? How am I limiting my gifts to humanity?
This is a good point to recollect the words of Marianne Williamson from her 1992 book, "Return to Love" (often misattributed to Nelson Mandela):
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
That’s a pretty tall order, and it’s very easy to see how impossible it is when one’s thoughts are so preoccupied with uncritically accepted ideas of survival and comfort.
When one thinks of the possibilities of a person embodied in these words, it makes the travesty and tragedy of world poverty even more abhorrent. These words apply to every person, every human being is a potential messiah.
Unfortunately, far to many people – in the billions – do struggle for mere survival rather than reaching for these lofty goals. What glorious spirit is wasting away somewhere due to a lack of human basic needs? This in the same world where Canada and the US collectively spend 80 billion dollars on themselves every year at Christmas.
There is not much that we as individuals can do to change this huge and systemic problem although we have to become far more aware of how our personal choices perpetuate it. But it seems to me that as we do not live in such dire circumstances by any measure, we have an obligation to strive for those goals listed in the quote above.
We are all limited. Perhaps few of us will become what we might consider as lights to others. And yet you never know what will happen when you throw off the walls that your fear once constructed around yourself.
I am a very limited person. But I have come to realise my actual, true limitations, and that has given me something authentic to strive against, to become a better person. For many years I wasted so much time building walls against myself - walls that every one of us would easily recognise - and then railing against them. I took on jobs and careers that I hated and then complained and rebelled. And as soon as I left one I went to another and started it all over again. Having given up the perverse game, I see where my walls really are, and they are all inside me. Trust. Fear. Social Anxiety and shyness. Hiding behind intellectualism. And yet I have found a glorious freedom to confront these and spend my time becoming a better human being and being a source of inspiration and comfort to others.
It is an imperfect project and I don’t see a resolution, but that’s looking at it from a winner’s and losers perspective. What matters is spending my life seeking growth and pursuing goals that are deeply and intrinsically meaningful to me. There is and will be no end to this, which is why I say that while “being” will no longer be a struggle, the struggles will in fact escalate. But when the struggle has such profound meaning, when they come from deep inside you, your days will be filled with far more joy and far less pain.
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