external monologue

Now I know why they make inmates dig trenches

This morning, Ty Willison and I began the long process of replacing the water service line to my house. That's the old galvinized steel pipe that runs from the city water supply into my house. Who knows how old it is or what shape its in, but it's recently sprung a leak. Since I've been meaning to replace the line anyways, and Ty's always looking for more work, we decided to spend the day replacing it with copper.

At 8:00 AM, we start digging. At 9:00 AM, I start calling around to try to hire more diggers. Two words: Georgia (f'in) clay. My gosh, it's like digging through Play-Doh. By noon, I've covered all of 10 feet of in the front yard, and Ty working from the other end has covered about 15. We break for lunch and try to call for more backup. No luck.

At 2:00 PM, I decide to call Swope Rental and rent a trenching machine. Basically an oversized lawnmower with a big, nasty, chainsaw style digging blade on the front. Took Ty's truck, picked up the trencher, back at the house before 3:00 PM. It starts raining.

In fits and starts, we get the trencher, which must weigh a good 1000 pounds, from the backyard, around the side and into my front yard. All the while, the rain continues, creating mudslides every time the trencher gets stuck. We finally get the trencher in place and start digging. And it goes fast. It's a beautiful thing after a morning of such slow progress.

But then it stops. It's caught on something. And we spend the next hour getting it untangled, from not one, but two previous galvanized steel service lines. You can imagine the sounds when those teeth hid the old pipes. Not pretty, and even more difficult to extract. Finally, we start making headway and cover about 30 feet of the front yard in 20 minutes, which makes the whole ordeal worth it.

Until we try to move the thing back uphill, into the backyard, and into the back of the truck. Once again, this thing weighs a ton, and it's been raining continually. Halfway back we hid a mudslide and I start picturing the work party of friends with 4x4's that I'll be calling to help me drag this hunk-o-junk out of my yard and return it 2 days late. While I'm playing out this scenario in my head, Ty, of course, is coming up with genius solution. He grabs some of the chain-link fence we've been tearing down, lays it in front of the beast and revs. And wonder of wonders, it starts moving! After a few more stints with the chain-link fence we've got the machine in the back of the truck and it's only 5:00 PM.

We dig for another couple hours and call it quits when the sun goes down. Ty suggest a beer, I'm game, and we settle down to a couple of homebrews. Shortly Ty heads home for dinner with wife and kid and I start some tofu and peanut sauce.

(Warning: at this point you might want to stop reading if minor (but bloody) personal injuries cause you to go a little woozy.)

And to cap it all off... with a million things on my mind, I'm not paying much attention to the just-sharpened knife that I'm filleting an onion with -- and manage to cut nicely through not only the onion, but a good 1/4 inch into the top of my thumb. Blood everywhere, my tofu's burning, Morris has the TV so loud he can't hear my swearing and pounding, and of course all I can think is "Sonofa! I just don't have time for this right now!"

Well, Morris comes to my rescue, helps bandage me up and finishes cooking the tofu. I opt not to spend the evening in the emergency room and instead just give the cut a good scrubbing (trying not to collapse at the kitchen sink, I being one of those afore-mentioned people who gets woozy at the sight of blood) and wrap it up in 6 band-aids and enough cloth tape to stop the blood-flow. Ugh, what a pain though. This things gonna take at least a couple weeks to heal.

Anyhow... we'd hoped to finish the whole plumbing ordeal today, but we're still left with probably 10 feet of digging to go, plus laying the pipe. I skipped work today, but based on the mound of angry emails I've been sifting through the last hour, I'll have to leave the remainder to Ty. (Not to mention, I don't suppose I I'll be swinging a pick-axe for a good week or two.) At least he's getting paid well...

What a day though. I don't even want to think about how sore I'm going to be in the morning. My hamstrings are already going into spasms and I'm having trouble lifting my arms above my head. Like I said, I feel for the inmates.

Well, I've gotta have that trencher back at the rental place at 8:00 AM tomorrow and a ton of emails to deal with before bed, so I'm signing off. If you made it this far, thanks for reading -- hope it was worth it.

Posted by andy at February 6, 2006 09:45 PM