The Path To Home Improvement Never Does Run Smoothly

Since I lazily let the lawn die am environmentally responsible,

I'm replacing the lawn with low-water plants.

(Things are looking pretty trashy right now. 

The Boy keeps daring me to park my car on the lawn.)

But before I could plant, I needed to fix the sprinklers.

I've replaced sprinklers many times before, 
so easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, right?

WRONG.

When removing one of the old sprinklers, the stupid riser broke off in the...

oh, I don't know what it's called. The t-shaped thingy?

I dug away at it with a blade and a screwdriver and whatever other sharp tool I could find,

but the dang thing refused to budge.

I thought, maybe?  I could jam a cork in it and try twisting it out?

NOPE.

(Oh, my Lord.  Do NOT do a Google image search for "Nope."

You will see things -- giant spiders and eyeball stuff and freaky ghost children -- 

that you cannot unsee!)

I poked and fussed and dug at the thing

until I finally just lied down on the sidewalk and cried a little.

But I rallied, and hit the internets,

and found there was a tool that was supposed to help.

I headed to Home Depot, and picked up one of these...

... and on the way home decided to get some comfort food:

a smoothie and fries from MacDonald's.

And why is this a comfort food?

Because when I was a kid, in the pre-Happy Meal days,

my mom used to let me order a shake and fries for lunch from MickyDees.

HA! 

 I love sixties moms.

They're all, "Carrot sticks are for dirty hippies!"

Anyhoo, I jammed the ewww-named "Plastic Nipple Extractor" into the opening,and...

 nuthin'. 

 I had managed to make the whole situation worse

with my previous fiddling and digging.*

Noooooo!!!

Sigh...

So I ate my highly-nutritious meal,

and decided to try again in the morning.

The next day I went to an actual plumbing place, 

and the guy there pointed me to something called a "slip pipe."

I cut out the old pipe...

...glued the slip pipe to one end...

glued the new t-shaped thingy...

and then TELESCOPED the pipe over to the other end!

WOO!

I HAVE ACHIEVED SPRINKLER!

Now, let me get to some planting!

* To be fair to the Nipple Extractor,

 it DID work on another broken riser that I hadn't worried like a dog with a bone.