The Mud and the Beautiful

Tulips From Our Yard

6:00

6:01

6:01

6:03

6:03

A dab of pink when I got up at 6:15 but now all is gray.  The lake's surface is wrinkled, still no purple martins to speak of, a chilly 41º with rain forecast for the next four or five days, perhaps snow on Sunday, yep, snow.

Since our back hoe guy and plumbers were not scheduled to come until 1:00, I decided to go to yoga, the usual eclectic class, then stopped for coffee at Ryders Cup.  Joyce's parents were there as well as Dave, so all is well at the coffee shop.   I stopped at the hardware store and picked up some grass seed because we will have to reseed the mess the guys made in the backyard.  When I got home, Evie was luxuriating in a house with water albeit it muddy for the first time since Saturday morning.

Since we had decided to go out to the Viking Club for dinner,  Evie chose to use up the asparagus for lunch, broiling them, then serving them alongside an omelet with tomatoes and feta cheese, our go to favorite omelet from Turkey.  We watched the opening diatribe by Stephen Colbert, dissing Trump of course and it was funny but crude and he certainly pushed the limits of appropriateness, even for a vulgar and often disgusting individual like Trump.

The guys were supposed to be at our house by 1:00.  By 2:00, of course, no one had arrived so it was time to play phone tag with the plumber and with Roger, our back hoe guy.  I finally got in touch with Roger and he was getting his back hoe on a trailer and would be at our house by 2:45.  And the plumbers would be able to get over to our house by 3:15.

Rodger And Me

 Roger, by the way, is an amazing guy.  Six years ago we got to know him went he put in our septic tank.  Four years ago, he was helping a friend on a ladder in December, fell off the ladder, was in ICU for a couple of months and ended up paralyzed from waist down.  He gradually learned how to drive, fit his back hoe with a chair which would raise him up to the cab, and he now is the go to guy around here for any work with a backhoe, amazing.  He has a young guy who helps him, drives the truck with the backhoe and backs it off the trailer before Roger mounts the cab. When Roger started digging, he found another holding tank which no one knew was buried underground.  The guys pulled it out, found the problem with the waterline into the house, repaired it, and checked to make sure the water was working, that there were no leaks.  Roger than filled the ditch, patted the area down with his back hoe and we said aloha to the guys.  We now have water, muddy for a day or two but hey, I no longer have to bring water from the lake to flush the toilets.

Pulling Out The Holding Tank

Mud And Water

After they left, Evie got to work on finishing up the Shutterfly Summer album, something she had been putting off for a week and I drove to Tri James and picked up six buckets of top soil because we will need it when we begin to reseed our yard.  Right now it's too wet and the rain over the next few days will hamper our beginning but once the mud patch dries up some, we will level it out and reseed.

Our Yard and Garden

At 6:30, we were happy to drive to the Viking Club, the sun high and bright in the sky, the lake a dark blue.  The parking lot was half full, so it was going to be a busy night at the Club.  We did find seats at the bar, ordered a Cuban and a burger, and we could relax finally after four days of being uptight about our well.  Our sandwiches were great, mine so HUGE that I brought half of it home for today's lunch.  We ended the evening drinking beer and talking with our friends Doug and Dawn, as well as John, the local dock builder, who we have gotten to know on Wednesdays at the Viking bar.  We had ordered iron dock horses from him in the past but that was 15 or 20 years ago.  The five of us practically closed up the bar, not a good sign.

We got home at dusk, the sun down but the sky still streaked with some light.  We had enough time to watch the most recent episode of THE AMERICANS before heading up to bed to read.  It was not a very exciting episode as if they are biding time, holding off the action until the final couple of shows. It was nice to go to bed knowing we would wake up to water...not just in the lake but in our house.

"It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump's inability to do either.  This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability.  It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence." 

Conservative Republican and Columnist George Will