Look! There is a thing!

 

You all know Murphy's law, right? (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.) It's so apt that many corollaries have been written for it. Like: "Anything that goes wrong will go wrong at the most inconvenient time and in the most difficult manner." Or: "Any job you plan will take twice as long as you expect. Even if you plan for a longer than expected time, the job will take twice as long as that."

(Google Murphy's Law corollaries; there are lists of dozen. Here's a fairly comprehensive example.)

I ran afoul of the last one I listed. Went out to check the water level in the pond, discovered that the pump that feeds the birdbath wasn't running. <sigh> The pump is encased in a homemade filter (one of these days I'll make a long, explanatory post about it), but some mud oozes through and clogs it up once in a while. I suspect the mud is about 50% duck poop (the neighbor has free-range ducks and geese) which is [a] more liquid, so [b] easier to ooze through the filter, and [c] much yuckier.

If I just change the filters, it takes about 10 minutes -- cut the twine that holds two round filters in the top of a bucket, put two new filters in, tie them in place. But last time, I tried to devise a filter around the output hose; it doesn't fit tight in the exit hole, and the pump draws water through there as well as the filters. It was obvious that the hose filter wasn't working as I'd hoped, so I tried to modify it by sewing the slits tight at the sides of the hose. (I had thought the suction of the pump would draw the slits inward, but no, they seemed to have separated instead.) Sounds easy enough -- but I was working in a restricted area (at the end of the hose, so I couldn't lift it up to a higher working area), in 95^o temps (35 for those who use Celsius), with flies swarming my legs and arms. GAH!!! So, the 10-minute job took 80 minutes.

But I'm cautiously hopeful that I've make the filters more efficient. We'll see...