We finally broke down and called a plumber.

Job one was to fix the dripping, make that running, bathtub faucet in the Brown Palace rental cabin. Mr. Tbend looked at it, threw up his hands and went to Las Vegas. The plumber fortunately had the right part on his truck so he fixed it in 15 minutes. it would have taken Mr. Tbend a minimum of 8 hours, mostly because he'd had to have taken it apart and then driven 25 miles town to look for the part, and with his luck it would have required more than one trip.

Job two was to replace a very old water heater that was in a cabinet (looked like a washer or dryer without any knobs or doors) with a 50 gallon tall and skinny Rheem. This meant new pipes to carry the water around. The old one was hard-wired (no plug that goes into an outlet) and the plumber said he couldn't do electrical work, so we have to do that ourselves. He told me what needs to be done, and Mr. Tbend has agreed he can handle it, and we have the parts we need in one of the garages.

But when it was time to start up the water in that cabin (this is the little rental cabin that we have rented a very few times because there is always some plumbing problem) the plumber heard a leaking pipe under the kitchen.

We can't get to it because the crawl space under the house is all silted up from the big flood of 1976, and working on the plumbing requires major excavations. Now we have to dig in there to find the leak, and may never find it.

One solution would be to run new plumbing inside the house - up the corner of the room and across the ceiling. It's what they do for houses built on a slab where it is impossible to get in there to repair plumbing. We are probably going to do this.

Plumbers aren't cheap. The water heater is going to cost about $800 plus add-ons for driving time to get here and maybe extra for the new pipes on the taller water heater. Hard to say what he's going to charge for fixing the faucet - probably at least $100. And the job isn't even done.

If I was Mr. Troutbend, I'd be tempted to stay in Las Vegas for the rest of the summer.

Here's a plumber's joke: Everyone calls it a Hot Water Heater, but no need to heat water that's already hot. Tee hee. Should call it a Cold Water Heater.