Author: Steve

  Five inches!   We had pulled out onto the road the night before and got the car hooked up.  We waded out to the RV this morning and left for a two-day driveabout.   We’re at Bandera for the night.                

  Boy did I get a lot of responses and helpful suggestions.   The water filter problem turned out not to be crystalizing mineral salts jamming up the threads (as I most recently suspected).  Jazi suggested I go press the pressure release valve on the top of the filter.  Well, I didn’t need to do that because I had already released the pressure, but her note got me to thinking.  Brother Tom had already made a suggestion about releasing the pressure, but I wasn’t ready to revisit the pressure release yet then.   I started out thinking that I could go press the pressure release button just to prove that the pressure had been released.  (No way the filter canister is going to unscrew if it is still under pressure.)  I knew there was no pressure because I had closed valves on either side of the filter and released any pressure by turning on the kitchen faucet.  Problem is, the filter is between the two valves, but the kitchen faucet is not, so the pressure I released from the faucet was not the pressure I needed to release.   So I went back out to the filter, looked for the pressure release button, couldn’t find it, then followed brother Tom’s suggestion and only closed the inlet valve to the filter, didn’t close the outlet valve from the filter, and let the pressure out with the kitchen faucet.  Pressure off, barely needed the wrench, filter removed and replaced.  Piece of cake!   Again, thank you all.  Put this together with yesterday’s report and we have a complete story!  

  If it were a story it would have a beginning, middle, and end.  I’ve got a beginning and middle, but don’t know the end yet.   We have a whole-house filter installed under the house that takes out any sediment and runs the water through charcoal to improve the taste.   The water here in The Valley has a high concentration of dissolved minerals that leave their own special “flavor”.  The filter works.  It doesn’t make our water taste like Colorado water, but it makes it better.   The filter needs to be changed every few months though.  That is not normally a problem, I’ve done it many times, but this time I can’t get the cartridge unscrewed.  There is a wrench to use to remove it, but even with that leverage I can’t get it to budge.   The top is mounted firmly against the wood frame above it, so I can pull kind of hard, but there are limits to how much torque I’m supposed to put on my torso right now.  Thinking it might be my own limits holding back the effort, I recruited a younger stronger guy, but he couldn’t get it to budge either.  (Just for the record, I did turn off the water valves and released the pressure in the system before trying to unscrew the filter.)  I tried tapping the top with a small hammer while I pulled on the wrench.  The whole thing is plastic, so I probably don’t want to try heating up the top with a torch to make it expand while I try to turn the bottom.   I’ve run out of ideas…  

  Of an Osprey        

  Foul, Ted Cruz.   https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2018/09/04/heavily-spliced-ted-cruz-video-falsely-depicts-beto-orourke-saying-grateful-flag-burning   Go to Time Out!