Water Pumps and Badgers

Fun day here! Former Journey front-man Steve Perry is currently installing a new water-heater in our house (but, somehow, he's the version from 1985, with the long, flowing, feathered hair--I'm not sure how he came across time to get here) with the help of Daryl Hall. Actually, now that I look at the first guy a little closer, he MIGHT be John Oates without his mustache. How exciting!

Yeah, so there's that. Sunday, we decided to try and drain the "sludge" out of the bottom of our water heater. We'd heard you were supposed to do it once a year, but we hadn't done it at all in the nine years we've been here. We hooked up the hose and drained it, but then, the cheap ass plastic valve wouldn't close tight again. With my help, the leak got worse and eventually I broke off or twisted up the plastic so bad it dripped constantly. I tried a few more gasket-type fixes which slowed the leak but didn't stop it.

So we called a plumber. He told us first that he'd never dumped the "sludge" out of his water heater in the thirty years he'd been a plumber because they purposely design the valves to be cheap pieces of crap. They do this because replacing just that valve will cost about as much as replacing the entire water heater. Thus, they keep selling water heaters at a brisk rate. Good advice, we could have used it around Saturday evening, though.

So we bought a new water heater. We REALLY wanted to get a tankless one. It would have been AWESOME, and more energy efficient. Sadly, our house is not designed to facilitate eco-friendliness. Those heaters need to be on outside walls because they need access to copious amounts of air to function well. And moving the water heater to an outside wall would have required, first, the addition of an empty outside wall and then the replumbing of our entire house. This would be a wonderful option, as we know our house will eventually need new plumbing, but not one we can afford. So, tankful water heater instead. Bummer.

Anyway, on to the

Badger Story

Many of you have probably heard this story, but it's funny enough to warrant retelling.

Almost exactly 13 years ago today (I can't remember the exact date, but it was in the last week and a half of May, I know that), Strange Productions went camping. Pat, Ben, Matt, Kris, Brian and Aaron went on a camping trip to 11 Mile Reservoir near Colorado Springs.

This was, in fact, a rather momentous occasion. With the exception of Kris, I don't think any of us had ever spent more than a couple of nights in a tent, and Kris probably hadn't spent THAT many more. Yet, for some reason, we decided that going out camping, in a relatively secluded wilderness (we would have to hike about a mile in to our camp ground), sounded like a wonderful idea.

Now, this entire trip was a series of hilarious events and I could probably dedicate an entire chapter to it in a book entitled "Why We Should Never Go Camping." Possibly two chapters. For instance (and I'm just going to give you the event, not any of the explanation), Aaron had to use his underpants in place of toilet paper, Matt had to stop about six times in the first few hours so he didn't crap his pants, later Matt peed in a big cup then dumped it all over the side of his car while driving 70 mph, we made THREE trips back and forth to get all of the "necessities" we packed, including a giant board game that we never even played, and, at one point, Aaron (whom I believe Kris was sharing a tent with the SECOND night) turned to him, with a hunting knife under his pillow, and said, "I've never been so scared in my life!" Then he fell asleep less than five minutes later. Oh, and Kris almost cut his hand off trying to open a glass bottle of coke with a hatchet.

The one story I'll share is about the badger we had visit us on our first night.

Well, we don't KNOW it was a badger, but in hindsight, and based on what we thought we saw the second night, we're pretty sure that's what it was. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After making our multiple trips back and forth to our cars back at the main campsite, we finally settled in for the remainder of the day in our two adjoining campsites. The first one was up a hill and not terribly idyllic in any way, but the second one was butted right up to a little rock lined cove in the reservoir. It was quite an attractive camp site. So, obviously, Brian and Kris claimed the nicest spot--a little cleared spot not five feet from the edge of the water, all but secluded from the other camp site up on the hill.

We put up all of our tents and spent the remainder of the evening making and eating dinner and, I believe, making characters for ONE OF THE role playing game we decided to haul out there (there were enough books to fill a backpack all on their own--but can you blame us, really? We didn't want to get bored out there in nature with nothing else to do). Though it might have been the second night when we did that. Whatever we did, we managed to leave quite a variety of food lying exposed on the picnic tables, I do know that.

That night, I slept surprisingly well. I woke at dawn to the sounds of Kris and Brian doing something noisy in the campsite and, before long, all of us were gathered out there to hear harrowing yarn they had to spin about the night they spent isolated down by their little lagoon.

Apparently, around 1:00 or so in the morning, Brian woke up to the sounds of something snuffling around outside their tent (and, should Brian or Kris read this, they'll have to correct me if I'm misremembering some of the finer details here--I'll try to be as truthful as I can given the fact that I can't quite remember what I had for dinner last night). He woke Kris. Together, the listened intently to whatever was outside their tent. It walked over to where the picnic tables were, then back to the water, then it cruised around the tent, smelling it heavily every once in awhile. Then it would make a "Hgghhee hgghhee!" noise every once in awhile.

Kris, because he's terrified of bears, automatically assumed that it was a black bear, and Brian, because he knew about as much as anyone about bear noises, believed Kris. So they spent the next five hours until dawn huddled together, in nothing but their underwear, coming up with various whispered scenarios for how they would deal with the bear should it decide to try and mess with their tent.

Of course, had it actually been a bear and had that bear been interested in the people in that tent, they would have been eaten like a giant human-stuffed burrito, but they planned nonetheless. They would "hit it high and hit it low" or "push it into the reservoir." Hearing their plans the next morning, I remember, was quite amusing--and I wish I could remember more of their conversation because it was all priceless.

That next morning, though, we discovered some hints about what the animal actually was, though, as there were footprints ALL OVER our two camp sites. As I mentioned before, we hadn't put ANY of our food away after that first night (and we learned a valuable lesson about that). There was a loaf of bread, two bags of marshmallows, and numerous other foodstuffs all over the tables when we went to bed. When we woke up, however, there were NO marshmallows left and only a few slices of bread. Everything else had been eaten. And there were only two different types of prints. The first we recognized as a raccoon. The second we weren't sure about.

But the next night (with Kris and Brian in different tents with different people and up with the rest of us in the other campsite), we saw the badger--and this time I heard it shuffling around outside all of our tents in the middle of the night. And I was the only one who DID hear it or see it, but see it I did. After the noise started, and because I was too sleepy to be thinking clearly, I shined my flashlight out the tent door to see what was rustling around out by the picnic tables (it was obviously a little disappointed because we put everything back in the coolers we brought that night). This was probably stupid because it caught the animals attention (and it spent most of the rest of the night walking around my tent, which obviously made sleeping difficult), but I was able to see what the animal was, and the new sets of prints matched the ones from the night before.

I had to describe it to everyone for us to figure out what it was because I'd never seen a badger before. I thought it looked like "a wide, flat skunk" because of its coloring.

But from then on, the badger has lived on in our group's culture. It's "hgghhee hgghhee!" noise is one we'll make to each other every now and then, and we still marvel at the fact that it HAD to have eaten at least one full bag of marshmallows and half of the loaf of bread in one evening and didn't even die. That alone made him enough of a badass to remember forever. So, now, I laugh whenever I see a badger--though I probably shouldn't, because they're nasty little buggers.