Christmas Eve

All the shopping and present wrapping is DONE. One small thing I ordered has not come, but that's OK. We will be having lovely steaks for Christmas dinner, baked potato, and pie. Maybe dinner rolls. The best part about the menu? No all day cooking marathon, and no leftovers.

I mentioned the plumbers coming in my last post, and so here is the scoop on that.

The sewer pipe in the back yard had become crushed by the roots of an enormous ash tree. We took the tree down last year when it failed to leaf out (i.e., dead) but of course the roots were still there. These plumbers brought their pipe camera and showed N the mess in the line, explaining why every few months we have had to have the line snaked out. No one else had tried to look at the pipe.

Anyway, the only repair was to *DIG* down to tie into the broken line above the break (just as it leaves the house) and then dig a new path to get to the HAU unit (the digester). In the snow, not so bad; but of course the digging needed to be done under our deck; and under the part of the deck where a storage building lived. We had to empty the shed (into my dining room right now, lovely), then the excavator tore the railing off the deck so that we four could sliiide the shed off the deck and into the back yard (but it can't stay there, the ground is too sloped).

Then the excavator tore the rest of the deck off (took about 15 minutes to destroy what took weeks to make), then began to dig. Cut the water line (oops!). Got that fixed, and finally there was the sewer pipe. After that it went pretty fast, mainly making sure the run is downhill (where all good s**t flows). And finally, tearing out the stump of the offending tree, so NO MORE roots.

But the price for all this was (eap!) $5300.

Below are the image post mayhem.

The torn out decking:



The "Root" of the problem:










The lonely shed, cruelly shoved from its home on the deck:




And the scene of the crime:









The snow kind of hides the raw edges of the mess. What will we do with the backyard now? Wait until spring, or better yet, summer. And the dining room? oh well.

Bumper Sticker for the day: "Vaje de: The feeling that you're doing it wrong all over again"