In any case, temporarily alleviated plumbing is much better than broken plumbing, I can attest to that, if only because it reduces farmer grumpification by about 86%.
The plumber is also a philosopher and at one point he was looking for a bushing he had just had in his hand and he couldn't find it and he spent several minutes looking and then he said, pointing into the forest of couplings and tees and elbows in a compartment of his plumbing truck, " ah, there it is, it was right in front of me all the time."
And he picked up the bushing and squinted through it at the sun and said, "like Happiness."
"I just had to choose it."
The horseshoer also came over and he trimmed Laddy's chipped-out feet and since he is also a philospher-botanist-shepherd among other things, he mused aloud about the introduction of Scotch Broom and Himalayan Blackberry to the West Coast, because they aren't native plants as everyone knows and he was alarmed about how the future might have turned out because those people in the Donner Party for example had enough problems on their hands and could never have made it to Marin to start their wineries if they had had to walk through thickets of blackberries on top of everything else.
Because as it turns out Himalayan blackberry was introduced to the United States as a cultivar in 1885 and we all know what happened then. So there is probably a parallel universe where it was introduced in 1776 and no people ever got to the West Coast because they couldn't walk through the blackberries, and in that universe the West Coast is probably entirely populated by Nubians who walked up from Mexico one day when they got lost looking for their home barn, which was probably about 100 feet behind them, but once they got started walking they just kept going in a typical Nubian fashion, and a thousand miles later they came to Northern California and settled down and in that universe Big Sur is called "Nubiana" and Carmel-by-the-Sea is called "New Nubiana" and Portland is called "North Nubiana" and Seattle is called "North New Nubiana." And so on.
Wow. I don't even know if that is scary or beautiful.
