What do you call a dog with no legs? (It doesn't matter; it's not going to come.)

I didn't write a post last night. It took all the energy I had left just to breathe.

 

After the busted septic line and finding out the guy with the mini-backhoe wasn't available I was out at 6:30 a.m. digging the trench next to MoHo. From the electrical connection box on the east side 12' down to the corner, and from there 15' along the north side (including under the septic line), all of it 18" deep. The top 6" is a mix of soil and gravel and from there down is saturated clay, which is why it took me until 11:00 to finish. Todd showed up at 4:00 with his Bobcat and a strange triangular scoop on the front and went to work digging the trench from there down to Fred.



By 7:00 Todd had dug the trench, we'd laid the electrical cable and CAUTION tape, and he had most of it backfilled. I was on shovel duty while he worked, digging out places he couldn't get to.

With about 15 minutes of daylight left he was backfilling up where I'd hand-trenched when he snagged the cable that runs from the satellite dish to MoHo. He forgot it was there. So we have no TV until DishTV shows up Monday afternoon to fix it. The good news: they'll only charge us $10 for the service call.
And as Pam commented, compared to being without plumbing, doing without TV is a minor inconvenience.

This afternoon, between rain showers, I backfilled the rest of my hand-dug trench (he decided he didn't want to work that close to MoHo anymore). Muddy mess, and rain-soaked clay ain't easy to shovel.

Todd also brought four dump truck loads of 3/4" gravel. He'll come back sometime in the next few days - if/when we ever get one that's relatively rain free - and spread it around MoHo and in a path down to Fred and the chicken coop. That will make a HUGE difference in the amount of mud we track into MoHo.

This is more money than we're comfortable spending at one time, but there's no other way to move forward with Fred's rehab. In order to get electric to Fred we had to go through the trench process, and doing the gravel at the same time saves us time, hassle, and mud.

I am exhausted.

We've had an inch of rain today, even with a break of several hours this afternoon. They're predicting another .25" before midnight and an inch tomorrow. Streams are way up and the creek through our property is running faster than I've seen it since we moved here.

Radio reception ain't so good when you live in a metal structure. But in the absence of TV a news junkie has to do what he can.