Like I Have Time For This?

I woke up this morning feeling somewhat refreshed, if not a little bit ripe. I was actually looking forward to the well repair event, and not just because I hadn’t showered since Sunday morning, but also — and here’s where the insomnia insanity kicks in — I was thinking that maybe I could turn this whole thing into a Really Cool Homeschool Lesson. I thought for sure the girls would really enjoy watching a back-hoe dig up the yard…all the equipment…all that dirt potential mud…my 3-year-old would be enthralled.

It could be a great unit on so many things! We could talk about wells — the science of digging them, the chemistry of water, the history of it all. I foresaw library visits, research projects, building a working model of a well-pump, a trip to the Hoover Dam. My kids are 6 and 3, remember. But so what. They’re smart. It could work. They’ll have fun.

I was feeling quite peppy as I drank my coffee. This was me…looking on the brighter side of things. I made the kids some breakfast, and I used actual dishes and spoons, feeling confident I’d have my water back on by lunchtime.

The work crew arrived right after breakfast. It was two guys in a little white truck. They said they thought they could fix it without digging up the whole yard. So much for the interesting back-hoe. But then again, at least I’d still have a yard after this was all done. So, still feeling cheerful, I told them that sounded GREAT.

They backed their truck up to the well head and got started, and here they are:

You’ll agree that it’s pretty anti-climatic. Just two dudes and a truck. And a giant frog head.

I still tried for the Really Cool Homeschool Unit on Well Repair. Here’s how it went:

Me: “Hey, you guys…come take a look…they’re gonna fix the well now.”

6-year old, looks briefly out the window: “Huh….Mom, I’m hungry. Can I have some Peeps?”

3-year-old: “Just a second! I have to go potty!”

Me, running towards the bathroom: “NO! Don’t go potty! You HAVE to use your pull-ups!”

And that pretty much ended our Really Incredibly Excellent Unit on Well Repair. I’m pretty sure those FIAR people will be calling me any day now to ask for my notes. Or my autograph. Or both.

A couple of hours later, the older guy knocked on the door and told me to go ahead and try the kitchen faucet, which I agreeably did, and low and behold:

I was so busy listening to the Hallelujah Chorus in my head that it took me a few minutes to realize the guy was telling me I had to turn off the water because they needed to shut it all off while they replaced the holding tank. He said the owner had decided to just go ahead and replace that thing too. So I turned the faucet off, asked for five minutes before he shut the system down and Ran For The Bathroom.

When I came out of the bathroom, I found that the owner had rushed over to tell them No, He Did NOT Want The Holding Tank Replaced After All. I’m not sure what THAT was all about, but no one was sending me a bill over it, so I just stayed out of it. The well repair guys packed up their stuff and left. The owner said “you should be all set now” and he left. And me? I headed for the shower!

I turned on the faucets and water came pouring out (more Hallelujah Chorus overtones) and then it started to… slow… down… and… soon… it… was… just… a trickle…of practically NOTHING!!!!!!

I called my husband and told him what happened and he said he would call the owner and get it taken care of. I sat there for a while NOT-CRYING. After I was done NOT-CRYING, I made lunch, and soon my husband called back to say that the owner was going to come back in a couple of hours and have a look.

So, a couple of hours later the owner came back. This time he brought his own toolkit with him. There was a hammer in it, but he never took it out. Thank God. He messed around with the water pressure settings for a while and then came back upstairs holding this:

This, he said, was the problem. I’d like to explain it all to you, so that you’d understand just exactly what the problem was, but unfortunately, I am the kind of woman who Just Does Not Understand These Things. In fact, if you approach me holding something like this, something that is clearly A PART of an appliance or a car or an HVAC unit and begin to speak to me about it, all I can hear is the WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH sounds that the teachers on all the Charlie Brown TV specials made.

So, when the owner brought this…THING…up into the kitchen and began to speak, here’s what I heard:

“Well, here’s the problem right here. It was the WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH.” Then he tilted the thing at me as if to indicate that I should look closely into the circular hold in the center, which I politely did, and then he said: “You can see here where the WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH….”

We continued on in this fashion for quite some time, with me nodding seriously in all the right places. (I may be a woman who Just Does Not Understand These Things, but I can certainly sense the appropriate moments to NOD SERIOUSLY when a man is talking.) Then we walked around and tested all the faucets, and the water pressure was fine. The water itself was hideously gritty, but that was apparently due to the WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH and it would wash clean away in an hour or so.

And so, it was getting close to 4:00 pm by the time the water had cleared up enough for me to actually consider standing underneath it for 15 minutes and washing with it. After my shower, I had a cup of afternoon coffee, knowing it would keep me up late and just not caring anymore.

But on the bright side, the sulfur smell seems to be gone.

And that’s what happened when the well-pump broke.

I have to go do the dishes now.

We have no water. The water pump is broken, and they can’t fix it until tomorrow. So, we’re roughing it.

Shit.

Any day that begins with your husband waking you at 5:45 in the morning to say that you’ll need to call the landlord early to tell her there’s no water is guaranteed to just suck. He had just gotten into the shower when the water … sort of… went… away, and then it was gone. Bye-bye water. You stank anyway.

And it does stink….The water here smells like sulfur, which is nauseating for sure, but at least we had water. Be careful what you bitch about, right?

So anyway, my husband left for work and I called our landlord at around 7:00 am. I just couldn’t call any earlier than that. She was up. Sort of. I think. I told her there was no water, and she said something about how the electrical-something-or-other might have frozen and blah-blah-blah and it was cool because it sounded like she’d had this problem before and it was easily fixed. She said she’d have someone come take a look and we hung up.

I quickly decided against any schoolwork. Got dressed, brushed my teeth (using bottled water), fixed breakfast for the girls, and had myself a good strong PMS-pity-party crying jag. My husband called about three times. First he called to see if there was any news. I said no, and that I’d call him when I had some. Then he called to confirm his dad’s date of birth. Then he called to remind me of something that I had not forgotten about. On the third call he said, “you sound stressed.” I said, “I have no working toilet.” He said, “I’ll call you later.”

Nearly 3 hours later, my landlord’s husband showed up. I like him. He’s cool. He totally helped us out by plowing our really long driveway after that ice storm, so he’s kind of on my ‘A’ List right now. I let him in, and of course the place is just a mess. Toys everywhere. Crusts of toast all over the table and floor. Children half-dressed with jelly on their faces. Me unshowered and trying to wolf down a hard boiled egg for breakfast. And of course, he came through the back door via the mudroom, where we keep the litter box, and well, let’s just say it’s WAY past time to clean that thing out.

You know the scene: it’s the one that says to your landlord ”Gee, I sure do care about your personal property” and says it with a smile. And on the heels of that, it says: “By the way…we homeschool. Classically. Don’t you wish you did too?”

So, he comes in and the first thing he asks for is a hammer. He says he’s pretty sure the problem is electrical and that a few bangs with a hammer ought to fix it.

Yes. That’s what he said. Don’t make me re-type it. That’s what he really said.

 Now, you know and I know that that sounds like utter bullshit (brings to mind, in fact, other more well-known male verbal blunders like yes, but I didn’t inhale and it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it), but I was so tired and so focused on getting him AWAY from the aromatic litter box in the mudroom that I simply nodded, dug through a toolbox, and found the man a hammer. He disappeared into the basement and reappeared a minute later to ask for a Phillips head screw driver which he needed, he said, to open the door to where the thing he needed to bang with a hammer was. I nodded again and handed him a screw driver.

A few minutes after that he reappeared again and decided to try flipping all the breakers. So after he flipped all the breakers, I went around and reset all the clocks while he took a quick call on his cell phone. Then he hung up and said, with real regret, that the problem didn’t seem to be electrical after all, and that it looked like it wouldn’t be an easy fix. He’d have to call the well servicing company. He promised to do that right away and left. I called my husband and gave him the update and he said, “give me that guy’s cell phone number.” (What they talked about, I can’t imagine, but I’m pretty sure the question yeah, but did you use a BIG ENOUGH hammer? might have been asked.)

Pretty soon, my husband calls back to tell me the well company is sending someone between noon and 1:00. And precisely at 12:30 pm, the guy shows up, and he’s a really cheerful guy. He mercifully does not ask me for a hammer, nor does he pull one out of his own, as he traipses down to the basement to check it all out. We’re having lunch by now, and I’m reading stories while the girls eat. Just as I’m finishing some poems out of Where The Sidewalk Ends, my 6-year-old says, “hey, what’s that guy doing?”

I look out the window and see the well-expert-guy talking on his cell phone and sort of wandering around in the back yard. He drifts left….he drifts right….he wanders off way back behind the barn and into the back field. I realize he’s looking for the well head and I go out to show him where it is. The well head is hidden by a piece of clay yard-art. It’s a giant frog head. My landlord’s husband had mentioned it (luckily) earlier, so I knew where to direct the well-expert-guy. (And I also finally had a reasonable explanation for why there was a giant clay frog head sticking out of the ground. It’s just not something you see every day, is all.)

The well-expert-guy pried the giant frog head out of the ground and tossed it aside. Then he spent some time doing this:

Then he wandered around the yard some more, talking on his cell phone. Then he came to the door and told me he needed to call in some reinforcements. So after a while, two more guys in a white truck showed up, and for a while they all did some more of this:

And after about another half hour or so, they told me that they needed to bring in a back hoe to pull the well pump out and replace it. They promised to come back first thing in the morning. My landlords, being the utterly cool people that they are, of course, have offered to let us move in with them for the day. My father-in-law, my sister-in-law, my sister…everyone is ready to jump in and help the minute we need it. But really, it’s just one more day. We’re gonna sit tight. Wait it out. And we’re only gonna flush if we ABSOLUTELY need to.

So, here we sit, water-less, shower-less.

But not homeless.