no water

It was definitely an interesting day yesterday. Another sunny day meant all of the kids were outside by 11 in the morning. In itself that was already a different and unusual start for the day. We played Frisbee and the older picked up their tennis rackets to play a game they made up two summers ago in our present backyard. That is worth a digression for a couple of sentences.

Since we have a fairly large backyard on our one acre lot, when we first moved into this house, the kids went crazy in the lawn. We had never had a big backyard like this. They just had to find a way to use it for fun. Somehow, I don't remember all of the details as it was during my pre-blogging age, one of the boys picked up a tennis racket and started hitting the ball in the backyard. Then another one of the boys did the same. Before you know it they were at each end of the yard hitting the ball to each other. All summer long they enjoyed this super lawn tennis without a net. Yesterday was the first day this summer they got back into this custom family sport.



While the boys were being boys and having fun, my daughter jumped on her motorized scooter and raced around the house. As I was pulling weeds in the backyard, she came up to me and said the front yard was saturated in water. That sounded strange as it had not rained in a couple of days and we never have standing water in the front yard. As I went around to inspect, I found water all over the yard at the end where our water well was located. I crawled under the house to see where the water main came into the house. Then I traced the line to the well. I could actually see the water bubbling up out of the ground. That certainly was not normal. As I dug around the well with my hands the normal rock hard red clay was like soup. I could hear the water pump turning on and off constantly, so I quickly turned off the water pump at the main fuse box. I started digging a hole around the well and was amazed at how easy it was to dig down two feet in solid clay.



I then got the boys involved to help me dig. What an adult would consider a disaster, my son took as a challenge for yet another fun adventure. He jumped into the trench and as it was mid-day the sun was starting to roast our white skin, he started covering himself in mud. He was having fun doing hard labor, which is a great lesson to learn from energetic teenagers. He was building up muscles, getting a valuable skin treatment and helping me all at the same time. If you have ever seen Arnold Schwarzeneggar in the original Predator movie, then this is what he claimed to look like. When we got over half way to the house the water line was getting deeper and deeper, so we decided to turn the water pump back on and see is the leak was visible. It was right back at the pump, so all of the digging was not needed, but we certainly had some dirty and entertained teenagers in the meantime. I drove the the local hardware store and for $15 had the repair kit and pip I needed to repair the PVC pipe. We fixed the pipe and waited the required two hours before turning the pump back on and all is back to normal on the water front.


The completed job. You just never know what you have until you have to do without water, if only for a single day.