About this blog

The original intention of this blog was to help promote my handcrafted jewelry and beading supplies. However, I believe I lead an interesting life (which Dave gets a lot of credit for), so you will often find ramblings about things other than beads and jewelry! Hope you enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoy living it!!!

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

How We Spent Saturday

Dave and I had made a list of things we wanted to get done on Saturday before we went to a friend's Halloween party. Unfortunately, priorities got rearranged after a little mishap involving my neighbor's Kawasaki Mule UTV and our well on Friday evening. My neighbor was on her way over to another neighbor's house for a Halloween party. She decided to stop at my house to see if I had changed my mind about attending. I'm not a real big Halloween person, and had already attended one party the Saturday before, had a Halloween party at work that day, and was going to another Halloween party on Saturday so Dave and I had declined this particular one. In any case, my neighbor pulled the mule up in the backyard and parked next to the screen. I met her at the back door and we talked for about 10-15 minutes. This entire time, the mule was running and the headlights were on. Suddenly I noticed some movement of the mule's headlights (I only had a small porch light on, and it's very dark in our neighborhood as it's rural and there are no streetlights). It took a second for me to realize that the mule was idling kind of rough and it was slowly inching itself backwards. Normally this wouldn't be much of an issue but there were some factors that turned this in to a big problem. First, the parking brake on the mule wasn't working, second, although the mule was parked on a flat spot, the ground started to slope downwards just a few feet behind it, and third, the pipes for our well were at the bottom of the slope (can you see where this is going?). When it dawned on me what was happening, I turned to my neighbor and told her the mule was starting to roll backwards. As she was running towards the screen door to try to catch it, I jokingly added, "Hey...don't let it run over the well". I probably should have kept my mouth shut about the well part 'cause it did exactly that. Once my neighbor went out the door, I couldn't really see what was happening as the mule was rolling backwards, so the headlights were still pointed towards the house...then I heard the PVC pipes from the well snapping...and I knew exactly what had happened. Dave was in the next county down visiting a friend, and it was late enough that all the stores were closed so there wasn't a whole lot we could do about it until morning. For those of you that have never had the experience of living in an area that uses a well for water, Ill give a brief explanation. Basically, in rural areas that are not on a city water system a well is drilled about 30-60 feet in the ground somewhere in the yard (normally in the backyard). Then pipes are run from this well to an electric pump that sits up closer to the house. When you turn on a faucet or flush the toilet in the house the pump pulls the water up from the well and runs it through a filtering system. While most of the pipes are underground there is a small section that is above ground (and I'm sure there is a reason for this...but I don't really understand the mechanics of it all!). In any case, those are the pipes that were run over and that meant I had no running water in the house. The good thing was, because of the time it happened, I really wouldn't have any need for water until the morning when we were ready to take showers and do some laundry. I consider myself lucky that Dave is a jack of all trades and can fix just about anything so I knew we wouldn't have to call anyone (and spend lots of $ on labor!) to have it fixed. Saturday morning Dave went out to examine the damage and determine what he would need to fix it. He returned form the hardware store and started on the repairs. Unfortunately, the PVC glue he used to glue the pipes together had gone bad and wasn't working so we had some leaks and had to go through the whole process of cutting out and fitting in new PVC pipes and priming the pump 3 times (we went to the hardware store and got different glue after the second set of leaks). What is that they say about 3rd times a charm!? My neighbor felt really awful, but I told her it could have been worse...no one was hurt and the mule didn't pick up enough speed to go through the fence and into the neighbor's pond! In the end, we were able to laugh about it!!!

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