View from the North 40: Life is like a box of higher-math equations

Sometimes life hands you a series of complications and issues, but if you keep working through the mess, in the end they all come together to create a simple answer — kind of how one of those complex mathematical formulas with a mess of numbers, letters and symbols turns out to equal “y.”

First of all, last summer the drain to our kitchen sink plugged up. It’s a dying, old trailer house scheduled for demolition, not the new house we’re still working on. These things happen.

I don’t have enough space to tell the whole frustrating kitchen pipe story; luckily, the ending is the true key element of this whole equation: When I got tired of hauling water outside to feed by hand to our shrubs and grass, like some pioneer woman without any modern options throwin’ slop water to the wind, I fixed the problem with two of my few good qualities — innovative spirit and shameless practicality.

I took a few careful measurements, made some reasonably accurate calculations, plus a couple assumptions, and gathered supplies, then without so much as a drawing to follow, I cut a hole through the kitchen wall. Yes I did, then I ran a new drain pipe from the sink straight outside and down a good stretch of the outer wall to a low spot behind the house where the water could soak into the ground and evaporate by its own freewill.

“There,” I said, “I fixed it.” Then I went on with life.

Then last winter, the outdoor sensor on our indoor-outdoor thermometer fell from wherever my husband, John, had placed it to get the best reading. It landed in a monster snowbank where it went a bit wonky. All winter we were never sure just how much we were going to freeze when we stepped outside.

As it turned out, the winter was just flat out bitter cold from start to finish, so I simply figured the temperature on any given day was “deathly,” and I dressed accordingly.

I survived, so I think I solved that part of the problem satisfactorily.

John brought the sensor in for a few days during the soggy winter-to-spring doldrums. He dried it out, then put it back where it had been, and life went on — but the sensor stopped working again this summer.

No biggy. I just decided this particular sensor was faulty and figured during the dry, hot weather the temperature was always “deathly,” so I took water with me everywhere and lived through that, too.

Now you’ll have to have faith because I swear there’s a point on the other side of this next kind of icky part.

My dog got a touch of what we’ll call intestinal upset. It was not life-threatening, nor did it cause him to be less than chipper or to make a mess in the house, all of which are good — for obvious reasons — but also bad because we, therefore, took an embarrassingly long time to figure out he was ill rather than just being annoying.

After two days and nights of demands, beyond his normal level, to go out and in, one morning I finally followed him to see what he was up to. That’s when I saw evidence that he had that intestinal issue — and we’re bad humans, but that’s a discussion for another day.

I treated the dog’s intestinal problem. His life went on, but we were still curious, so I kept an eye on him and finally spotted him snooping around behind the house.

Yes, of course, he was back there where the kitchen drain emptied onto the ground, looking for treasures. Some delectable food chunk must have escaped my sink strainer one day and laid basking like a petri sample in the sun until he found it.

I investigated the spot he was sniffing and found no further treasures, so whatever he had eaten was a rare find.

However, I did discover the sensor on the damp ground directly in the path of the gray water draining from the pipe I had jury-rigged to the kitchen sink.

John hadn’t known last winter the water drained in that spot. I didn’t know that was where the sensor was falling. And the dog didn’t know the tainted food morsel was going to make him sick. These conundrums seemed like random numbers, letters and symbols, but the answer to the complicated, convoluted situation was a simple “y” all along.

As in “y” are we still living here rather than in the new house that, even unfinished, already has fully functioning plumbing, its own accurate indoor-outdoor thermometer and no sketchy food bits on the ground for the dog to get into.

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