Learning what I learned before, I made sure to wait until the water got absorbed into the dirt enough to clearly twist off the head. I oriented the arc so that its right-most would line up with the edge of the grassline bordering the driveway and no farther. From there, I put in the key that shortens the arc to its left. I had the cycle going on for 15 minutes, giving me plenty of time to see how far this head would go and either cut it or lengthen it so that it wouldn't sprinkle water on the driveway.
And I got it done. It was perfect. So, I pulled the key out of the top of the sprinkler head ... and the goddamn, motherfucking whole thing came out. Without the sprinkler head, the water was coming out of just the open end of a pipe, so it just looked like water coming out of the ground. I needed to stop it; fortunately, by the time I got to the garage, there was only one minute left in the cycle. Water dribbled its way down to the street, but it stopped before it got really, really bad.
Swear to God I screwed it in. But I have to admit that I had trouble when I didn't think I would have to worry about lining up the threads. And for the goddamn life of me, I couldn't screw the fucking sprinkler head back in a second time. I don't know what it was. The threads at the bottom of the head seemed to be fine. It's hard to look five inches deep into the grass, but I think the threads at the open end of the pipe are just fine.
There is only problem I could see, and it might be a big one. There was dirt on and in the open end of the pipe. I was able to scrape off enough so there was nothing blocking the threads so that I could screw in the sprinkler head -- I think; shit, I thought I did that the first fucking time, but apparently not. The issue is that opening should be completely clean. No dirt at all should be on or in it, because if there is, it would block the flow of water coming up through the pipe and into the sprinkler head. I don't have a way of completely cleaning that opening, so now I have to wait until I have time (probably tomorrow/Tuesday evening, assuming it isn't raining) to turn on the cycle and see if water is flowing freely through that sprinkler head. If it isn't ... shit, man, I could see enough pressure building that the goddamn head flies up in the air, or hits one of the cars, or dents the house, or conks some neighbor who's just walking. If it's that bad, that sprinkler head is unusable, and since I can't turn off a sprinkler head, that whole cycle has to be shut down until, I don't know, I get the company to do what it does in order to blow out all the dirt that's in that pipe.
Motherfucking Christ, why in the fuck do we have this goddamn sprinkler system, huh? In particular, I hate that My Fucking Father has saddled me with the responsibility of maintaining it. It wasn't my goddamn idea to install a whole fucking system which, by the way, I have only used to only water the lawn only, like, four times so far (I've turned it on way more times to fix the arcs one some of the heads, a practice I'll continue to do until they're all correct). He got off on something that made him feel like a tried and true homeowner, but the silly and stupid details like fixing this shit? No, I deal with that because that bullshit is beneath him.
Let's go beyond that: Why do we have lawns? Why do we need to constantly need to tend to grass? What is giving a lawn a crew cut proving? I think we do it just to keep up appearances, and as you all know, I don't give a good goddamn about keeping up appearances. Fuckin' A, man, you should see how brown my lawns are. And I don't care, and I don't have my parents here to make me care.
But now I have to fucking find some time to check out this sprinkler head and hope it's screwed on tight enough that it won't go flying from all the water pressure and smash one of my car windows or kill a stranger. Oh yeah, then I have to hope that it still has the arc that I want. This is just a frustrating pain-in-the-ass, man. I just wanted to take the key out of it, that's all. ...
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