"Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore." - Ogden Nash

If you're on Facebook you've probably seen people who are posting something for which they're thankful each day from Nov. 1 to Thanksgiving. By now they're starting to work through the list of obvious things; this is where it starts to get interesting.

I'm not participating, but today I'm thankful for a lily pond and a 5-gallon bucket. For unexplained reasons ("We show no service problems in your area.") we lost almost all water pressure this morning. Faucets would still trickle weakly but there wasn't enough pressure to overcome the valve resistance in a toilet tank. Hauling water took care of the immediate need and an hour later pressure was back. Whew!

Our last house in Michigan was in a rural area without municipal water service, so we all had wells. And septic tanks. The latter need only gravity and have no moving parts so unless there's a major clog everything is just fine. But a well requires a pump and that in turn requires electricity. One year we had a major winter storm the first week in April (yes, that's still winter there) and were without power for three days. That's a long time to be without electricity and water! Things were more difficult because our 100-year old house used a boiler and the original radiators for heat. It was a gas boiler but without electricity the electronic ignition won't light the burner. No lights, no heat and no water for three days with sub-freezing temps.

To make matters worse I had just brought home a dozen day-old chicks, and they need heat to stay alive. Because the heat lamp wouldn't work I built a fire in the fireplace (doh) and put them in a box covered with a towel right in front of it. And that meant sleeping on the floor in front of said fireplace to keep the fire going strong throughout the night.

The septic tank? They're not as fool proof as we'd hoped thanks to a 50' maple tree right next to it. Who thought that was a good idea? The 100-year old ceramic pipe running from the house to the tank in the back yard had seams through which maple tree roots would grow, eventually closing off the pipe. This will only happen in the spring when the ground is still frozen and you don't go down into the VERY cold - as in sub-freezing - basement for days at a time except to that area right at the bottom of the stairs where the firewood is stored. I'll spare you the details but this house had floor drains in the basement that connected directly to the pipe to the septic tank, so anything from any of the waste pipes on the first or second floor that couldn't make it to the tank backed up into the basement. That would be the basement I didn't go into for days at a time. Anything and everything.

The guy from the septic tank service company who came with a monster rooter (aptly named in this case) said he'd never seen a worse root-caused clog. He recommended we pay the $90 to have him come out every three years to have it done proactively to avoid another mess in the basement.
Turns out the correct interval was two years. DAMHIK

Power outages and malfunctioning septic tanks aside we loved living in the country. Those problems pale in comparison to the pure joy of watching the farm tractors drive up and down the street, gathering fresh eggs every morning, rabbit meat right from the hutch to go with vegetables from the garden for dinner, sitting on the front porch at sunset watching the fireflies over the lawn and the bats circling above,  and the total darkness at night. Instead of a backyard with a giant cherry tree, two maples and a mulberry we have gravel. Instead of watching John Deere harvesters we see EZ-Go golf carts.

I miss country living.