Bad Timing

      From the "Oh, Like I Needed This" department: I went down to my basement ham-radio setup to while away some time while the laundry ran, only to find a slow drip of water had started, apparently not long before. There were just a couple of drops of water on a typewriter awaiting repair, and a little more on the cardboard box it was in. The James Millen Co. VFO under it was dry. All this was sitting in my well-used office chair.

      I figured it was a one-time thing, from scrubbing my hairbrush in the kitchen sink right before (horrendous, it was). My hamshack is under the kitchen -- not a great location, but it was a cozy spot next to the stairs, handy for antenna feeds because it's near the center of the long axis of the lot and it was already wired for power.

      I went to the other side of the basement, moved laundry from the washer to the dryer and when I returned, water had been dripping on the chair.

      So the chair is outside drying now. Investigations in the basement aren't revealing any spraying pinholes or iffy connections in the pipes or drain and a search under the sink doesn't find any dripping water -- but there's a hidden area from the bottom of the sink cabinet to floor level, the "kick" about 4" high. The previous owner did a lot of his own plumbing, with a carefree disregard for the intermixing of copper and galvanized-iron pipe. This has made for problems in the past and there may be another of his copper-iron-copper unions hidden in that kick space.

      For right now, I'm going to keep an eye on it. If I have to drill some holes and saw out an access opening in the bottom of that cabinet, I will -- but not four days after cataract surgery, not unless I absolutely have to.

      The fun never ends.

     UPDATE: The dripping appears to have slowed markedly overnight.  For now, it appears to be strongly correlated with running water from the tap in the kitchen sink, which I have avoided doing this morning while continuing to use the drain.