People hear that I live on an island and they automatically assume that it’s paradise.  That all we do all day long is lay around in a hammock and watch the sailboats go by.

Well, I gotta tell you, it’s not for everybody.  There’s no Home Depot, no Bed Bath and Beyond, no fast food, no dry cleaner, no pizza delivery.  If you want food, you cook it.  If you need a tool, you make do with what you have.  If something goes wrong, it’s pretty much up to you to fix it.

So, when one of our water pipes magically sprung a leak under our house, it was up to me to crawl down there and get it fixed.  Yeah, I called all the plumbers on the island (all three) and they were all booked until September.  And further, they won’t go under my house if it’s wet.  There’s electrocution risk, union regulations, but most importantly:  they don’t want to.

So here I am, 20′ inside a muddy crawlspace, soaking wet because that leaking pipe drenched everything and it won’t dry out because it’s under a freaking house.  There were electrical wires that rats had chewed through.  I taped them up while lying in a pool of muddy water, live electrical wires.  FYI – don’t do that.

Yeah, it was a tight space.  Moldy, dank, wet.  I had just watched Alien Covenant the night before and in hindsight that was the wrong movie to watch before crawling into a tight, dark spot like that.  I had to use a pipe cutter to cut the corroded pipe out, then cut a new length of pipe to fit, and then secure it with adapters.

All fixed.  I gave it a few days to make sure it didn’t spring any new leaks before crawling under there yet again to wrap it with insulation.  These are old pipes.  I think I can expect to be doing this a few more times before all is said and done.

That’s it.  That’s the hole in the pipe that caused all the trouble.  Just fyi, all those products out there that promise to fix these things, all those tapes and patches and crap, none of them work.  None.

It may seem like an ordeal, but there are people in these islands who get by just fine without things like electricity, hot water, running water, etc.  Some people here are completely off the grid, and live their lives without any of the things that might seem indispensable to modern life.

And I’m not one of them.