Teyrnon

Well, it's the end of the month and just about the end of the week. Shumate came by this afternoon to check the air conditioner. Just the routine seasonal maintenance. Nothing more to be said about it.

My oven is still broken. It looks like it's going to take a little longer to acquire a heating element for it. The Microwave seems to be working mostly okay. Still, I'm relying more than I like on stove top meals. One can only tolerate a diet of soups and stews so long.

In other news I broke down and ordered two pairs of jeans from the web. I was down to one pair that was quite the worse for wear. I probably shouldn't wait until I'm down to one pair but I don't get the opportunity to get to places to purchase clothing ordering online is a bit of a last resort. I'd rather prefer to see what I'm buying before money changes hands when I'm buying clothes.

Still waiting to see what sorts of 5 to 10 inch tablet devices come out this year.

This is my post this week. I finally found some sweatpants at one and only one Wal-Mart near me. Tried other stores but had no luck. Compared prices at the store and what I saw on the website and learned that they were cheaper if ordered from Wal-Mart online. Bought a pair at the store I found them and resolved to order the rest online.

My oven died the other day. Looks like the bottom heating element burned out. That's the same failure the oven had five years ago, the heating element was replaced then and it looks like it'll be replaced yet again.

Other than that there isn't really anything new to report. I have a headache so I'll close here. Maybe next week I'll have more to say. Be well, all.

Well, the leak has been found and fixed. I hope.

Now, I have to ask, does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with mold?

Had an interesting time getting a lizard out of the house. Finally managed to get it to go out the sliding door. Herding lizards is hard they don't always take off in the direction you expect.

I wish I could figure out how he got in. I sealed off where I thought they were coming in last year but there must be somewhere else too.

I went to get something out of the closet in the office and found a dead anole. That's the second dead lizard I've found in the house this winter. It's more than a little disconcerting to discover dead critters when you open seldom opened doors in the house. It'll soon be spring and a little spring cleaning is definitely called for.

Well, work on the storm drains continue along. I took some more pictures today on the theory that all the noise they made today was reflective that some progress is being made. The gravel they keep bringing in is going somewhere even if I don't quite see where it's all going. Today they've added a pile of sand next to the pile of gravel. I'm starting to suspect I may not have grass in my yard for quite a few months. I'm uploading the new images to the same gallery I linked to Saturday. You can refer to that post if you're curious. I'm somewhat amused that the large backhoe they've got out there is a Volvo. The other earth movers they're using are Volvos too. I don't know why that amuses me, it just does.

Today we talk about cleanout plugs. While the guys from the county were here checking things out Monday night they told us they'd be happy to flush out the sewage line. They had the equipment but alas for some unfathomable reason this house had no external cleanout plug. The only cleanout plug was located in the crawlspace making it next to impossible to get to. Following on from that they told us if we'd put one where it was accessible they'd come back out and flush the line. With that in mind W started digging around where the sewage pipe left the house.

We were kind of thinking the cleanout might merely be buried. Such wasn't our luck. W dug into the ground while I held the flashlight. This was around 11PM or so. That flashlight must have seemed like a beacon to every flying insect for miles because they flocked to it. Ugh! At any rate, we eventually got deep enough and found where the pipe exited and no sign of a cleanout. The pipe came out of the house and took a 45 degree angle straight down. Digging a little over a foot deeper we found where it connected to the sewage pipe. Which by the way did in fact go off at an angle that looked like it indeed must run right through the middle of that patch of grass I talked about in my last post. W decided he was going to put in a cleanout first thing in the morning. Home Depot opens at 7 after all. His friend R had already agreed to come out and help him with the task.

I slept over at his house and in the morning he took off for Home Depot. He was already working on it when I walked over to the house. August is really not a good month for this kind of thing. It's just too swelteringly hot for any kind of outdoor work and I'm especially vulnerable to heat exhaustion. I hated not being able to do more to help except for running water or flushing toilets when we needed to check for leaks. They finished around 1:00 in the afternoon and headed off to the office to get to either a scanning or CD duplication job. I'm not sure which it was.

It wasn't long before the guys from the county arrived with their large blue tank truck. Long enough for the join compounds to have set I hope. (W used something with a 20-minute set time so it should be fine.) They quickly got to work flushing the line. I watched from the driveway hoping I wouldn't see what I was fully expecting to see. But alas it wasn't long before water and gray ooze came gushing out of the hole. The resulting geyser only rose to about a foot before they cut it off. (This was much to R's disappointment when I called to tell them about it later. R harbored a certain glee at the thought of having video of the sewage shooting upwards of a hundred feet and showering the neighbor's house. While it might have made a statement on Youtube I'm very glad the reality wasn't that dramatic. It's really not a mess I'd want anything to do with.)

As I write this it is day three of this little episode and there's a crew out there, as I write this, digging a huge hole on the front lawn. Judging by the man standing in it it's about 5 feet deep at the moment. Hopefully it'll all be fixed before the day is finished.

Let me say this right now. If you live in a house make sure you know where the sewage line cleanout is. If you don't have one that's accessible from the house's exterior you really want to consider having one installed. You never know when something like this might happen and it's always good to be at the very least minimally prepared. It might save you from digging holes in your yard in the middle of the night. :)