BEDM Day 12 - Monday Means Garden Time

I work in a laboratory at a hospital and laboratories like those work 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week /365 days a year.  The lab is NEVER closed and that means that I get to work weekends.  I'm pretty proud of myself for getting blogs up on both Saturday and Sunday, even though I had to work.  But since I work every other weekend that means I get one day off during the week, which for me happens to be Mondays.  So today is a One-Day-Weekend Monday.  It means laundry, house cleaning, gardening and usually a little bit of laziness (or a lot of laziness based on how busy it was at work that weekend).  In the spring, summer and fall however garden time takes up a lot of time on Mondays.  Today I went out to the vegetable garden to work on the watering system again.  We put in the most wonderful underground PVC system last year, and it's still working well, but last year I had made a boo-boo.  The thread for the entry to the system was supposed to accommodate a small hose to attach the watering system to the irrigation system.  The problem is it turns out I'm not good with male and female ends.  That would be the proper end needed to attach a hose, not a people, but the idea is the same.  Which end goes where?  It turns out I have a male end on my faucet from the irrigation system (most all faucets do) but I put a male end on the entry to the watering system.  Now I'm a big proponent for equal rights for all, but it's kind of difficult getting two male ends together when we're talking about PVC and hoses.  Last year we jury-rigged a hose so that it had two female ends, which meant cutting off one end and replacing the male end with a female one, but that also meant that the fitting was...poor.  We did lots of tweaking and I religiously tightened the screws on the clamps all summer long and made it through.  But at the beginning of this year it was high on my to-do list to fix those entry pipes.  So I came up with an idea for this Mario-style PVC do-hicky that would get the entry to the watering system to line up just-so with the irrigation system and then it would take only one very small hose to get them together.

Tools of the trade.

But, not being a professional with PVC, my measurements were obviously off and they'd need to be almost perfect to get it right.  I am a PRETTY big perfectionist but at some point we all say screw it.  So Mom stopped by a local hardware store (instead of the big chain store where we'd gotten our PVC and had seen all the options available) and they had the most miraculous PVC attachment.

The end is female (hooray!) and it twirls!  Which is the other problem we'd run into.  You see, when you screw on a hose to a stationary object it twirls around (obviously), but when you try to then attach it to another stationary object it becomes impossible.  Something has to give.  This glorious piece of PVC will solve all of my problems.  So today I got to put them on.  First I had to saw off the only crazy attachment we'd put on.

Then I filed down the tops on all the PVC because they were crooked and a flat top makes a better fitting.  Then I used PVC cement to put them on.  I was going to take pictures, but you have to be fast because it kind of "melts" the PVC and you have a limited time before it dries, which is when you want to have your other piece attached, and I was doing this solo.  So you only get before and afters.

With that finished I looked around the garden beds and those that we hadn't turned over yet were growing the nicest crop of weeds you've seen.  So I weeded and in the middle of that Mom came home from the eye doctor's appointment she had (see you also get to schedule as many doctor and dentist visits you can on those Mondays too).  She joined in and we got them cleaned up right quick.

Besides growing weeds there are some real vegetables already growing.  Peas and carrots, onions and radishes and potatoes have all been planted and are eagerly awaiting the return of their water via the new and vastly improved watering system!  (They have to wait 24 hours.  The rules of PVC are simple and finite.)

Toby waiting for Mom to come back.

Gardening hats are required.  A lady shouldn't be too tan.
(Plus I was wearing my glasses and a hat works better than sunglasses.)

After all the hard work you need to relax for a moment.