Today Came Out a Mix

[feste_sylvain]

(Strictly speaking, I suppose I'm talking about yesterday, the day before midnite.)

A few bollixed things this morning, but nothing I couldn't slog thru. tamidon left for work before alyveritya woke up, but she woke up just a bit later, so I was only mildly late for work.

The barometric pressure started below 30, and dropped all day. My head and wrist both complained.

Work itself was also a slog. I made slow progress all day, but man, I should have been able to finish this project days ago. And it's still not done.

And in the middle of work, after lunchtime, my younger calls me to tell me that there's no water in the house. That is, no sinks are dispensing any. Various people packing baitcon supplies from our garage chime in with helpful details. I tell them not to flush any toilets, and call tamidon at her work, where she's almost done for the day anyway. I tell her that our new, very expensive, water pump seems to be on the fritz, but that she should check the circuit breaker just in case it drew more power than it should have.

She gets home, and tells me that the circuit breaker was not tripped, so she called the pump guys, and they told her to turn it off and they'd be here as soon as they were done with a job in New Hampshire.

I continue to not finish what I'm doing at work, leave a copy for one of my genius overworked coworkers to see whether she can spot the problem, and change my route to go pick up Chinese food (because nobody's cooking in a house without running water).

I pick up dinner, and get home to see a bunch of guys snaking our well. And frobzwiththingz's and klingonlandlady's car at the base of my driveway. Okay. I maneuver around the pump guys' trucks, guest car, and tamidon's car and bring dinner in.

Then the pump guy tells me that they're done, the pump should be working now, and that we'll have to run a hose from the pump out a basement window and out the front yard to flush the sediment (just like last month when the new pump was installed). They found evidence that the well had been hit by lightning, and because the well is so deep, the lightning scampered across the surface to the pump wiring instead of reaching all the way into the ground. As soon as this weakened wire was given enough torque by the pump, it snapped, and that's why it stopped working. Unfortunately, this is not a warrantied service; fortunately, lightning strikes tend to be covered by homeowner's insurance. And this wasn't a whole new pump (which we're still paying off), this was a single part and a decent amount of labor. The service was more expensive than dinner, but in the same ballpark.

Oh, and then I bit a major hole into my tongue while eating dinner. Man, I hate doing that. Now all my pork with garlic sauce tastes like my own blood. And so does the dumpling. And the rice.

The water ran dirty out of the hose for a few hours, but finally ran clear enough for me to stop the flush, throw the switch to supply water to the house, and then detach the hose (getting a modicum of water in the basement). The kids finally got to flush the toilets, and a small amount of brown water came out of several faucets before running clear (both hot and cold).

I ran a load of black laundry (which cares less about rusty water), but the washer seemed to get stuck on the first rinse cycle. Unless my sense of time was totally screwed by that point. I hope so.

Lightning. Our well was struck by lightning.