Despite the beautiful display of morning and evening colors, the rest of yesterday was not good. A cold, strong wind blew all day, and one of Tristan’s tenants put regular dish soap in the dishwasher, and that drove the final nail into the coffin of the dishwasher that Tristan had been nursing along, hoping to get more life out of it. Since we don’t use our dishwasher, I pulled it out from under the counter, disconnected everything, loaded it in the truck and drove it Tristan’s — that was after I coaxed, or more like tricked, the truck into starting. It does not like to start in the cold. One would think pulling a dishwasher out should be a relatively simple task, but no, it wasn’t, and the beast fought me every step of the way. Fortunately, I had lots of help from Spunk and Laurie which made things a little easier.

Murphy’s Law was in top form when I started working on replacing dishwashers at Tristan’s. When I looked under the kitchen sink for the shutoff valve to the water supply, everything was wet. There were two leaky lines that had been dripping for who knows how long. After I got the replacement dishwasher hooked up, the water connection at the dishwasher was now dripping as well. The old copper compression gasket wasn’t seating properly to the new connection. I made a run to Home Depot, where I learned that I couldn’t buy compression gaskets, because we are not supposed use 3/8 copper supply lines anymore. So I had to buy a dishwasher kit with a new flexible supply line (better) but it was just barely long enough, and it included a bunch of parts I didn’t need.

Replacing the supply line to the dishwasher fixed one of the leaks under the sink, but the other one was at a plastic connector that the tech who installed a water filtration system in the house used to connect the cold water to the filter. The copper wasn’t playing well with the plastic and it hadn’t seated properly. I pulled hard on the copper tubing like I was trying to pull it out of the plastic connector. That seemed to finally seat the copper better with the plastic, because it stopped leaking; however, bumping something against the connector might make it start leaking again.

As the French say “les choses sont contre nous”, and everything seemed against us today. At least the the beautiful colors of dawn and dusk were a good reminder that things are not really all that bad.