Copper pipes

A number of homeowners across the US have been awakened to a situation which requires prompt attention and has an expensive solution. From about 1980-2000, houses that were built on a slab usually had copper water pipes installed underneath the slab of the house. American copper had became too expensive and so Brazilian copper was substituted for the purer American copper.

Now, slab houses built with Brazilian copper water pipes have a problem. The copper pipes are developing little green spots on the inside of the pipes which gradually totally rot out into holes. The pipes silently begin to leak water. Homeowners don't often notice it until they hear strange sounds in the house or the water bill becomes astrononically high due to the ongoing water loss from underground.

Fixing one leak is like chasing cockroaches....there are always more leaks. And homeowners's insurance won't help because that insurance only covers "damage from leaks not damage to the pipes themselves". The only permanent solution is to "repipe" your house for water. In other words, you create another system to get water to the water sources in your house. This expensive solution involves stringing a PVC line into your house from the water meter through your attic and then connecting new water lines downward to all water sources.

It means carving holes into ceilings, laundry room walls, bedroom walls, bathroom walls and into tiled showers which then later must be re-paired. It means emptying everything out of kitchen cabinets, bathroom cabinets and linen closets when the plumber arrives. If you decide to shut off water to the house so as to minimize the leaking (a good idea), it means filling bottles for drinking water and buckets to flush toilets when you take a shower. It means trying not to fill up the dishwasher by microwaving meals and eating on paper plates. Every time the water is turned on and off, someone must go to the main shutoff valve where a hole has been dug in the ground next to the water meter. "Re-piping" means having plumbers in your house for four days running and having the cat hide under the bed in the far bedroom so the noise doesn't hurt her ears so much.

Living with restricted water reminds me, as hurricanes do, how precious that clear liquid we call "water" is. There are millions upon millions of people in the world who would be delighted to live with the irritations I have just described. We sometimes forget how fortunate we are.[adsense:]

On the name "Marvin"

The first time I was allowed to go out to do a volunteer job during the time when I was hospitalized, I elected to do hospital work. Since the only hospital that would accept volunteers from a mental hospital was the local Jewish hospital, I went there and volunteered, both as a patient and after hospitalization for almost a year.

I enjoyed it tremendously and the ladies there were most kind to me, some of them almost treating me as a daughter. They gave me all sorts of pep talks and particularly admired my skills at being able to get the cranky mimeograph machine to work any day of the week. I never got the feeling that the fact that I had been in "hospital" and was Christian to boot made any difference to any of them. One lady always made a fuss over my blond wavy hair. How she wished her daughter could have that......naturally, though, of course!

After a year, I approached the Christian hospital where I had been a patient suffering from pneumonia and ear infections when I was a child of five. I got my boss at the Jewish hospital to write a recommendation which evidently was glowing.

The director of volunteers at the Christian hospital asked me with a slight frown, "Why do you want to come here?"

I looked at her for a moment and a thought began to form in my mind. "I wanted to be among my own people". She stared at me for a long moment and the long moment began to be uncomfortable. Finally, I said, "My last name is "Marvin" but I'm not Jewish. My mother served on the Women's Auxilliary Board here for many years."

A tremendous look of relief appeared on her face as well as a huge smile. "How wonderful! When would you like to start work?"

To Anonymous Comment on Mayflower descent

There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who are descended from the Mayflower and would like to "claim that descent" as my anonymous commentator said.

Although I was adopted in the era when any knowledge of my background was jealously guarded (even my original birth certificate was falsified with a wrong name for my mother), there is one way which can unlock many of the secrets of adoption. It is the way I found my natural family.

In many states, if an adoptee can present to the probate judge in the district where they were born, a certificate signed by a doctor saying that said adoptee has an inheritable medical condition which could be passed on to any children, most likely the probate judge will order that the original family should be found so that medical information about the family as a whole can be passed on to the adopted person.

In my case, a probate judge in Chicago ordered that my family should be found based on a doctor's signed note that I had bi-polar disease. My genetic family was found in a matter of weeks. The cost to me was in the $600 range. I found a brother (and his wife and two children), an uncle and four first cousins and their children in 2001. I am still in touch with many of them, particularly my brother and his wife. One of my cousins is into genealogy and took my maiden (adopted) name and showed me how I was related by blood, through my natural maternal grandmother to my adoptive father who had a Mayflower heritage reaching back to William Brewster

The irony for me was the fact that the doctor who sent the letter to the judge and other doctors before him had lied. I am not bi-polar. But because of their lies, I found my roots.