My ``pleasure'' for garbage disposal installation came on Saturday, when my father was banging around under the sink anyway, and I was thinking I might make a visit to the Book Garden before going to the Cinematic Titanic show in Princeton. But my father got started later in the day than maybe he figured, so I hung around for the ``little while'' that my father figured he'd need, although he confessed he wasn't sure if that ``little while'' was going to be ten minutes or an hour. It would be closer to a half-hour, for the record.
What he needed me to do primarily was to lift the garbage disposal up to the sink, and twist this metal ring into place. What I couldn't do was get it aligned just right and move the ring so as to allow the notches to slip into place (this is clearer in person, but you're not there, and it doesn't matter) as long as my father was asking why I didn't have it in place yet. Before I could snap at him to stop telling me what to do and let me do it, he decided the thing to do was get his hydraulic jack and use that to move the disposal into place.
This was exactly the right thing to do, too. We needed a little gimmicking to make sure the disposal stayed level --- the jack was designed for cars, and lifted things at a slight angle --- but it was able to move the disposal up, slowly, and let us make fine little adjustments until it slipped exactly into place, and we closed the ring up at ease. If you need to replace a garbage disposal yourself, I recommend using a car jack.
After that was a bunch of hose and pipe fitting, since a garbage disposal needs every hose ever be fit around or into it. There were extra complications since the new disposal had to be fit into the sink's other basin, so the tangle of pipes underneath were being redirected even more than normal. However, a test run of filling up the sinks and emptying them revealed no leaks, and letting the water run a while revealed no leaks, and running the dishwasher on a test load revealed no leaks. Not a drop.
How we managed that we'll never know, and we'll never manage it again.
Trivia: The oldest recorded prison at the location of London's Newgate took in its first prisoners in 1188. The last gaol there was demolished in 1904, for an expansion of the Old Bailey. Source: Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career Of The World's Greatest Scientist, Thomas Levenson.
Currently Reading: Tides Of Time: History of Ocean County, New Jersey. This was a late 1930s effort by high school students in the county, all of whom got little pieces of the county history to write about. So it's a very discursive tome, and hugely variable in writing, and I certainly wouldn't want to pick on it. But there are some wonderful bits, such as this sentence about the Lakehurst Naval Air Station and the dirigibles kept there: ``[The Los Angeles] is out of commission because the Navy Department claims that it is not air worthy. The lighter-than-air ships, unlike battle ships, can fly only for a certain number of years.'' This bids fair to make me smile all week long.
PS: Flattening the City, Or, what is the simplest possible way to interpolate a city's population? The answer may surprise you.