In about an hour, when the glue dries, the days of doing the dishes out on the grass with the hose will be over. Kim was the one that suggested that we get a sink set up. At first, I didn't think we needed it. I was feeling alright about roughing it a bit and getting a little rained on occasionally as I cleaned up after our meals. But Kim began calling around to the different hardware stores to see what was available and what would be the best value. Not to our surprise, Home Depot had the best deal on the sinks. I think my reluctance to get a sink was a lot about my feeling intimidated about doing any kind of plumbing. But the sink train was starting to chug down the track and I thought I better get on board and understand what's going on before I was left behind.
Home Depot always amazes me. You walk in and are greeted by the smell of lumber and the towering racks of goods to make stuff. Whenever I would go into a hardware store before, everything I saw was just a blur to me. I couldn't distinguish between this, that or the other on the shelves. But, now as I walk the aisles of the stores, I can begin to pick out more detail of what I am looking at. It's a lot like learning a language. When Kim and I first got to Japan to teach English, all we would hear was garbled sounds coming out of the Japanese as they spoke to us. We would nod politely at the speaker and then later turn to each other with a quizzical, "Did you get that?" Eventually, we could make out the words and comprehend what was being said to us. But it took a while.
Although my hardware store vocabulary is getting better, it is far, far, far from fluent. Point in case is our excursion to get the utility sink. We get to Home Depot and head for the section of the store with the sinks. We see a basic utility sink and then we see an all in one box set. With the basic sink we would have to get our our own connectors and faucet and who knew what else. It was only $57, but my insecurities were on high alert thinking about having to walk down the long plumbing aisle looking for whatever we needed. The all in one set was $137, but we were unsure if it was of good quality, because it was all boxed up. We called over a clerk that was willing to open the box for us, but couldn't answer any of our plumbing questions about water pressure or help us work through our unique situation of having a 100 gallon gravity feed tank. The clerk was nice enough to call someone over from the plumbing department to help us.
In a few minutes, Jeff, the bold legged clerk comes swaggering up the way towards us. He made me think of what Yosemite Sam would be like if he smoked a fatty before coming to work at Home Depot. First off he told us the all in one was rubbish. So he hoisted the basic sink into our cart and began rambling off this garbled speech about this pipe and that connector and this kind of glue and make sure to use some teflon tape. Kim and I looked at each other and asked with our eyes, "Did you get that?" Kim asked Jeff something about the inflow of water in the sink. Jeff kind of just squinted a smile, slapped me on the shoulder and said, "He knows what I'm talking about. You guys are OK." I just stood there in a daze not having understood a word of what was said.
"Come, follow me," Jeff commanded. He took me down the plumbing aisle and began throwing plumbing items into our cart. "OK five of these. One of these. Two of these. Three of these. This pipe. And this pipe too. You'll need this glue and this glue. You got teflon tape. OK, you got it?" I must have had this look of, "huh?" and it must not have registered with Jeff because he disappeared. I must have looked desperate because Kim looked sympathetically at me and said, "We don't have to do this. We can put all this stuff back." "No", I thought to myself, the train's moving full steam ahead and I will understand how to do this. We caught up with Jeff and got him to slow down his rambling a bit and got a better sense of what needed to get done. Kim took it for the team by asking some of the "stupid" questions to which Jeff would always end his answer with,"He knows what I'm talking about. You guys are OK." It was a lot like being in Japan and I would have Kim order for us at the restaurant. My Japanese was pretty good, but it was far from perfect. So when the Japanese would see my Asian face and hear this broken Japanese coming out of my mouth, they would have a confused look and a questioning gaze of, "Are you retarded? Or Korean?" They couldn't quite figure it out. But with Kim's Caucasian face and broken Japanese it made sense them. So it was in Home Depot, with Kim's female face and "stupid" question it made sense to Jeff. Thanks for taking it for the team, Kim.
And Jeff, bless his heart, saved us about $60 with his recommendations and gave us a great plumbing lesson. We feel good that there is no longer a language barrier at the hardware stores. We are becoming more and more fluent every time we walk in.
It took us about two hours this morning to set everything up on the sink. The glue should be dry right now. I'm excited to see if we created a water system the Romans would be proud of.
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