Reckless

14:25 Sunday, 14 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 72.93°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 11.59mph
Words: 866

Throwing caution and sense to the wind, I'm downloading the MacOS 27 beta. It's 32GB, so that's going to be a while. (Software Update says about four more hours.)

Little Snitch seems to be incompatible, but I've installed a nightly beta that's supposedly compatible.

Mitzi wanted to change the top of the bathroom vanity, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Well, the new vanity that fits the new vanity top arrived on Friday and after posting yesterday morning, we proceeded to install it. Figured it'd be a two-hour job, tops.

Took more like five.

A large part of the problem was a certain kind of blindness on my part. The cabinet was going over an existing plumbing setup that we couldn't disassemble, the drain and supply lines. The supply lines are Pex tubes with shutoff valves attached. When I looked at the problem, all I seemed to see was the drain line.

I carefully measured the diameter of the drain pipe, its distance from the back wall and so on, also the distance to the center of the cabinet. I then used a hole-saw drill attachment to cut a hole precisely large enough to pass the drain line through, and used my jigsaw to cut an opening in the side of the cabinet so we could lower it over the drain line.

When that was completed, we tried to lower the cabinet over the pipes, and it wouldn't go! I thought I must have made an error in one direction or another in cutting the opening in the side of the cabinet. Pulled it out and cut a bit more material out on either side, "just to be sure."

Tried again, still wouldn't go all the way down to the floor.

Then we saw the Pex tubes!

In all that effort, it never occurred to me that they might be a problem. There should have been enough space below the drain line for the Pex to pass under the cabinet, but there was no way to manipulate those pipes. In hindsight, perhaps I could have duct-taped them to the bottom of the drain line.

But when we realized the Pex tubes were keeping the cabin from reaching the floor, we also realized they had to come up through the bottom of the cabinet along with the drain!

Took the cabinet back out and cut an even larger opening in the side of the cabinet (none of this is visible) to accommodate the Pex pipes, and enlarged the opening in the bottom to do the same.

New problem! Pex pipes just kind of flop around. How were we going to get them to come up through the bottom of the cabinet?! I thought of using some para-cord tied off to each of the shutoff valves.

So we try again with para-cord tied to the shutoff valves and a larger, squared off opening in the back of the drain pipe opening to accommodate the tubes. Somehow we managed to get one of the supply lines in front of the drain pipe in such a way that we couldn't get the pipe to finish going up, nor the cabinet off!

Now I needed to make the hole bigger again, only now there are two soft plastic supply lines in the hole with the drain. I'm not going to be able to use the Makita multi-tool to do that! Back to the garage for a small wood chisel, and I'm down on my knees carefully carving a larger opening around this stupid Pex pipe.

Finally we get that free, get the pipe up the back side of the drain where it belongs and lower the cabinet, only to find that the cold water line continues on to be the supply line for the toilet, which was all there in plain sight the entire time! I had to cut another opening in the other side of the cabinet.

So we pull the cabinet off again, back out to the kitchen to cut another opening, and finally get the whole thing finagled in again with the para-cords and it was in!

I was sweating like a pig, tired and frustrated.

How could I not see those Pex pipes? What was going on in my head that I never took them into account when thinking about how I had to modify the cabinet to accommodate the plumbing?

It's very troubling.

I mean, I'd used graph paper to figure out how to locate the drain pipe openings. We created paper templates which we used to test whether the measurements were right? The Pex pipes were there the entire time, I kept shoving them out of the way, and it never occurred to me that they would require being taken into account.

Am I becoming cognitively impaired somehow? Is this an early sign of dementia?

Well, we got the cabinet in and the vanity top mounted, the plumbing connected up. Minor leak with the drain pipe fixed this morning with teflon tape. All's well that ends well, but wow. It's really shaken me.

Which makes me wonder if deciding to install Golden Gate is especially reckless.

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