Absence makes the heart… tense!
It’s been a long time since I have been able to write—and it hasn’t been due to lack of ambition, certainly; I’ve had a lot I wanted to say. But I’ve had to limit myself to a scribbled note here and there on the back of a receipt (sadly, on fast food receipts sometimes, rather than something more interesting or more healthy!) due to a very pressing lack of time.
[Warning from the author--this post is just news and apologies and excuses. If you want entertainment, skip it.]
The weeks leading up to the closing of our house were unimaginably hectic. The first problem was that our house was being sold for cash, but the buyers didn’t actually have cash; they just had the promise of cash to be coming shortly, and we were instructed by our agent to wait until we had confirmation. When that arrived, it left us only two weeks to pack and arrange for our moving.
The next problem was that our septic system—which we’d always thought performed beautifully—failed its stress test. For this test, every faucet in the house is turned on full for fifteen minutes, and all the toilets are flushed repeatedly. This should raise the septic tank level only an inch, but ours went up four inches. I tried to argue that our water pressure is set higher than normal—I’d done some plumbing improvements—and we had a LOT of flow from those many faucets. But our inspector said we had to get a pro out to check the system and fix it.
Well, the guy we called was great, but full of bad news—in order to dig up our system with his machinery, we’d have to tear out our lower deck, and our beautiful arbor (and its overlay of mature wisteria that had been so enjoyable for the last three years). The alternative was to remove all our deck boards and a few joists, and then he’d dig it by hand—for $900 total. That was about $900 more than we could spare, so he told me how to dig down and find “for sure, a cast iron pipe, filled about 90% with scale and rust” and replace that with plastic. So Jeane’s son Ryan, who was fortunately still with us, helped out a huge amount and we got a huge hole dug four feet deep to expose—a ceramic tile drain pipe. When I called the septic guy, he said we had the wrong pipe, because ceramic doesn’t clog. So, at his suggestion, we removed a huge spirea bush and dug up the distribution box, thinking we might find a clog there.
What we found instead was a plastic pipe, laying on top of the broken lid of the distribution box. Evidently a previous homeowner had bored a deep hole for a deck post and drilled into the box, cracking it, and rather than replace it or repair it correctly, he had knocked a notch into the side, put in plastic pipe to the new leach field, and when it ended up too high, had just covered the box with some burlap and poured concrete over everything. The concrete had come out of the hole in a big crumbly lump when we pulled the fake vent pipe out of the way.
When we tried running our own stress test to see if the septic water was draining out of the ceramic tile, we got only a trickle. I left the water running and called a rodding service. Ryan stayed to watch the hole while I headed to the hardware store for parts. Ryan lent me his cell phone, and then called me on it when Eric the Rodder arrived; he told me that while they were pondering the lack of flow, suddenly the septic dam had burst and the distribution box flooded healthily, bringing with it a pretty healthy stench. Apparently the baffle inside the tank was clogged with toilet paper, or else someone had flushed the Sunday news. Hmm—lately that might have been appropriate, especially with the country’s economy going down the toilet. But I shouldn’t digress purely for editorial comments.
I met with the rodder briefly—another great and helpful guy, who refused any money in trade for his time or advice. He wanted us to dig up the ceramic drain and replace it with plastic, but skip the distribution box (which wasn’t doing any distributing for the new leach field, anyway) and install four=-inch drain pipe with a proper slope. So we did—or I did; Ryan had smelled all he wanted to smell and headed back to California (where he found out he’s being assigned, at last, to leave for Signals Intelligence training with the Air Force at the end of 2008).
I should give Ryan proper credit for sharing the workload to dig up the end of the septic tank (which turned out to be a fairly recent vintage plastic tank, with a 3-inch pipe coming out of an improperly-installed gasket and leaking all over, then turning through several elbows to finally flare out through several expanders and rubber gaskets into the 6-inch drain tile). I replaced the whole mess with new plastic, properly done, and tied it all directly in the leach pipe with ¼”. If anyone ever digs this up, they’ll be pleased rather than disgusted.
After watching it all for a few days to catch any odd leaks (none noted) I was surprised to find I spent an entire backbreaking day to refill the hole—with the dirt, sticky messy clay, rotten wood fragments, automobile parts, and other assorted paraphernalia that had been excavated out of it—and then hours more to reinstall the joists and deck boards, this time with stainless steel square-drive screws. I don’t always do first-class work, but I prefer it when I can.
We got the mess cleared up just in time for the new buyers to come in and look at our furniture—which meant we had to clear up the mess inside as well. And we had to apologize for the chlorinated water—our well-head had a bad gasket, which allowed a bug or two to crawl inside and kick the bucket, which put enough bacteria in the well that we failed that inspection as well. So I had to find a replacement gasket, remove the head, clean it up, and follow the inspectors recommendations for treating the well and water. I wish I hadn’t…
He was a Licensed Environmental Health Professional, so I trusted him to know his business—until I got through the fifth bottle of pool chlorine and realized that the fumes were about to kill me, along with all the plants in the area. An internet check revealed that for a 150 foot well with 6.5” casing like mine, the usual treatment was to pour in half a bottle of household bleach—which is half the strength of pool chlorine. I had just killed my bacteria with a very lethal 20X dose. But I almost killed myself doing it, especially when I took a shower that night and almost toasted my poor skin. And then I had water far too toxic to put into the septic system—even the short flush I had done ended killing all the bacteria that are supposed to live in there, and made the septic field stinky for days until we added good bacteria again.
I poured the initial dose of water into the neighbor’s pool, and then when I felt a little better about safety started flushing into the river—for six hours. And after it was done, we still couldn’t stand to shower or smell the water. So every day for the rest of the week we flushed the well for four or so hours—and never lost a bit of pressure, which says a lot for our water supply.
Our schedule, likewise, was under greater pressure all the time. It’s funny, I guess—I can’t speak for Jeane, but when I pictured us selling the house and moving to a boat, I saw it all laid out neatly in order, with all the loose ends tied up nicely and all our extra stuff conveniently sold or given away beforehand. As my famous ancestor wrote to a mouse: “The best laid plans o’ mice and men gang aft agley.” As deadlines approach and we realize we can’t get it all done, we discard plan A and go to plan B. And when B goes agley as well, we switch to plan C, and to plan D. And now we’re on plan M.
Our neat and tidy organization and cleaning ritual fell apart quickly, especially when other work I had to do filled much of my time, and Jeane was scheduled for full 40-hour weeks right up until the day before closing. Then I called in an insurance adjuster to look over a pile of books, electronic parts, and plotter media that had been damaged due to a burst pipe inside the house. I thought he’d just look it all over and make me a settlement offer, but no—he wanted a full inventory of every single item. And furthermore, he wants me to look up every single book on the internet and establish a provable value. Well, I’ve got over 600 books that were damaged or ruined, plus full collections of Fine Woodworking and Fine Homebuilding, and a lot of airplane parts and accessories. I told him I’d have to deal with that part of it after we got moved, but still I needed to spend three days going through sodden and musty books, writing down the title, author, condition before the damage, and current condition. I would rather have been packing, rather than typing on the laptop and hauling soggy goods to the place where I store the boat—he reserves the right to see any of this again later.
So that’s how it went right up until the closing—and the last day we worked through the night and only got the house cleared out at 7 AM, with a closing at 9 AM. We headed out for a breakfast at McDonalds (the Scottish restaurant) and then to our extended stay hotel for half an hour nap before the closing.
I had been dismayed to find out two nights’ previous that the nice Studio Plus apartments where I had intended to stay was fully booked, due to the nuclear fuel replacement going on at the nearby power plant. So was virtually every other kitchen-equipped place in town—and we badly needed a full-size fridge to hold all our stuff, plus we really, really needed a good high-speed internet connection to take care of business for the week we planned to stay in Rockford. We were going to copy all my CD’s to the computer, handle all our address changes and correspondence, and otherwise deal with a change in our lives. Well, when the Extended StayAmerica room ended up being the size of a very small boat (with a mini-galley to boot) we left, paying $80 for that half-hour nap. We instead found a much larger room at Sweden House, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite up to expectations either. It was still too small for most of our stuff that needed to be sorted, and even though our stay there ended up lasting eleven nights instead of seven, we got only about 40% of our work done because we never did get an Internet connection that worked, and the computer in the lobby had a virus and couldn’t go on many of the sites we needed (not even the ones where we’d get e-mail).
Finally Jeane thought of going back to Rockford College, where she has alumnus privileges at the library, and we took care of a few things there. And now we’re finally out of Rockford—although not for good, as we’ll have to spend another month back there to finish up some work on Pixie and outfit a trailer for which we traded my Harley as a mobile workshop/storage unit. But we’re leaving behind a sparkling white boat—Pixie got painted last week, which is a story in itself—and a much better organized mess. We’ve got an auction scheduled for a month from now; we sold almost all of our furniture to the new owners; and we’re on our way to Florida for a few days to visit my mother and stepdad, and then up to Oriental to visit Gypsy and take four days of sailing lessons in Jim Edwards’ 52-foot ketch, which will help us prepare for handling multiple sail configurations on Gypsy, and also give us some practice handling a boat similar to John’s (my Australian friend) 50-foot sloop Skoiern.
Along the way, I want to do some writing that’s a little more fun—like talking about coffee. Just wait.
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