Did I Offend Someone With the Pump???

I took a long, hot shower last night.
Then I closed the drain and took a bit of a soak.
Then my daughter came in looking for me, so I opened the drain, got out of the tub, started drying off -- and realized that the water was not actually going anywhere.

I flipped the handle up and down a few times. Each time it made a solid clunking noise, as if it was opening and closing whatever it is that keeps water in the tub or lets it out. But nothing actually happened.

I don't have any clog remover, so I left it to sit overnight, figuring that by morning the water would have drained.

Nope. It's all still there.

The water was draining fine during the shower. I think it was closing the drain that caused the problem.

WTF? So now I can't even get my bath water out of the house???

Are my water spirits pissed off because I have a pump sitting in my house, in preparation for the next possible flooding rain?

The Tub

I worked 90 minutes of overtime tonight, and then because the traffic was so bad, I decided to stop for groceries near work instead of near home to give the highways a chance to clear out. That half-worked, so I was able to call _storyteller_ and we had a rare chance to enjoy an extended chat.

After chilling out at home for a while, The Daughter and I tackled the tub drain. First, she and one of the twins bailed out all the water that was still sitting in the tub from last night and my hang-over-the-side-of-the-tub hair wash this morning. During this operation, Daughter slipped and fell -- fortunately not hurting herself, but soaking the fuzzy bath mat and some of the floor.

The Water Spirits do not give up without a fight around here.

But eventually the tub was emptied. Following the unison advice of my Friends here and my handyman friend at work, I took off the plate that holds the drain lever. Unfortunately, this revealed only a long, narrow verical passage. I couldn't see the actual mechanism that controlled the drain stop. So we popped the guard out of the bottom of the tub, revealing a similar, but horizontal, passage heading into the side of the tub. I needed a camera and a light on a flexible extensor(?) of some kind to actually see what I was working with.

Lacking that, I used the most basic of home tools: the straightened wire hanger. (The Daughter had fun helping me use the pliers to untwist it.) Not able to see what I was doing, I stuck it down the vertical passage and started scraping and leveraging, hoping to catch something and pull the plunger (or whatever it was) into the "open" position.

What happened was that after a relatively short time the stopper came popping up out of the hole. It was a plastic tube with a cap on one end, about 2.5" long, with what used to be a small plastic loop on the top where the metal hook from the lever used to be attached. The loop had broken, so there was no way of fixing the existing mechanism. But the little bit of water in the bottom of the tub happily gurgled its way down the drain, so I am declaring victory.

I haven't the slightest idea how this little device can be fixed. It seems to me to be very poor engineering to have so basic a function so difficult to get to. Maybe it protects it from everyday interference, but I'd hate to think that I would have to open my wall or remove and reinstall the tub in order to fix it.

But I'm pleased that I was able to achieve a workable solution, pleased that my daughter was an active part of the process, and pleased that she didn't hear her mother say, "We're going to have to wait until your father gets home on Saturday to fix this."

I know I keep talking about this, but I really do need to do some kind of ritual or something to make peace with my water spirits and find out what they want from me.

Had I mentioned that there's now an intermittant trickle of water down the inside back of my refrigerator that no amount of changing the settings seems to fix? I fear that may be the site of our next skirmish.

Of course, kateri_thinks would remind me at this point that "girding my loins for battle" is perhaps not the best way of visualizing the next phase of this relationship.