Filter insanity

Walt is continuing to cures me for insisting that we purchase this super-duper reverse osmosis water filter. This weekend he decided to install it, assuming that it would take about a day to put in -- it needs a separate p-trap and drain plus the hole in the countertop wasn't big enough for this new (and uglier) spout, since this filter requires a specific spout. He also had to take the sink out to put in all of this new plumbing, so it was quite a process -- and the directions were complicated enough that it looked like you practically needed a PhD to put it together (there are three separate filters on this system and a bunch of tubes linking them all together in a specific order). He spent most of Saturday installing the thing, and after it was finally in, it turned out that the garbage disposal (installed weeks earlier) was leaking -- and not just a slow, drip drip leak but a veritable torrent of water. This filter installation morphed into an entire weekend project -- I think Walt had to reinstall the garbage disposal three times, and at least twice we were on the verge of packing it all back up and returning it to HD for a different (and significantly simpler one). It appears that it's been fixed now -- at least nothing appears to be leaking -- although there are now so many pipes and wires and tubes under the sink that there's almost no room to store anything below. There wasn't much anyway, since we got a kitchen sink the size of a small bathtub, but now there's really nothing. We're going to monitor this filter for a few days just to make sure that it's working properly (and that we like it) before we caulk the sink in and make it permanent.

I'm feeling very guilty about the filter, now, although it was inspired by my friend Tricia. Her husband is an environmental lawyer, and she always has these horror stories of cases that her husband is working on involving environmental pollution and such. Her husband recently settled a case about supplements where the core ingredients were being imported from China -- it turned out that herbs this company was using were full of lead because there is such terrible environmental pollution in China (and no regulation) that lead from the soil was leaching into these herbs. Apparently the finished product was off the chart in terms of lead content. Tricia and her family are gun-shy from incidents like these that they filer their water twice -- once through a built-in system and again through a filter pitcher. I thought this filter might be a common ground for those of us who don't want to do double filtering. And I figured that since the Bush administration’s anti-EPA is doing things like trying to reduce the standards of the Clean Water Act, it's better to be safe than sorry. I had no idea, though, that it would be such a headache to install.

It rained intermittently this weekend, so we were looking for kiddy activities that we could do indoors (or partly indoors). One thing I stumbled upon was the Bay Area Discovery Museum, which is a children's museum in Sausalito, right near the foot of the Golden Gate. Devon and I went there on Saturday afternoon to explore it. Walt was skeptical that it would be interesting to her, since he had taken her to the Children's Museum of Manhattan when we were in New York, and it was a total dud. This one turned out to be great, though. They had a special indoor and outdoor section just for children under 3 years old, and it had lots of fun stuff to climb on and run through -- all with a nature theme. In one room there were insect costumes, and Devon spent time trying on ladybug and spider costumes and then running through the room with them on. There were also a lot of great outdoor play spaces, which meant that she could really run around and expend some energy. One section was construction-themed where children could help "build" a chunk of the Golden Gate Bridge. This also included an area with rocks, shovels and funnels -- this was a big hit with Devon. She insisted on wearing a hard hat (available in this construction section) and spent a lot of time putting handfuls of rock down the funnel. We arrived late in the day, and while my expectations were modest, it turned out that there were lots of things to do, so we didn't get to a quarter of the activities. I noticed on the way out that there was an entire art room as well as a few other "discovery centers" -- who knows what was in those. But we covered the kiddy activates enough for me to be convinced that this is a place that we'd return to again.

Devon appears to be over her sickness at last -- a relief for everyone. Last week she was so sick that we couldn't take her to any day care at all, so Walt and I had to keep taking turns at childcare (which, as you can imagine, really cuts into work and other productivity). It seems like she caught the bug at Elaine's, since she mentioned to Walt that another child there, Dustin, had gotten sick and a few other kids were out. It's also nice that she's chipper again; she was awfully whiny and unpleasant when she was sick (not surprisingly, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant to be on the receiving end). It's good to be on the standard schedule again.