That'll be another $200, please.

Oh happy day, the septic tank guy came today to empty our tank. But first he visited each of our neighbors. Boy, we REALLY need to get our house number posted at the foot of the driveway again!

When he had finished, he said he had good news…and bad news…The good news? Well, our 500 gallon tank was now nice and empty. Hooray! The bad news? We need a new “outlet baffle filter”. Wha’…? Allow me, Princess Groundy Pants, to enlighten those of you on municipal water about the merits of the magic outlet baffle filter.

 

The goal of the filter is to prevent stuff like TP and whatnot from accidentally going through the outlet pipe and into the leach field, thereby ruining said leach field.

Apparently, the parts themselves aren’t expensive. It’s never the parts, though, is it? It’s always the labor. The septic guy explained that this should happen pronto, since the first step involves pumping out the tank – since we just did that not six hours ago, we called and scheduled this to happen tomorrow. The septic guy also explained that as you never want to see a plumber with a shovel in his hand – unless burning dollar bills is your idea of fun – we should dig out around the tank to expose the outlet pipe, since that may well need to be cut as part of the process.

Do y’all remember the last time we had to dig around the septic tank? Fall, 2007? Anyone? Kevin dug five big holes…and then one nine-foot trench…looking for the tank. Yes, the chorus is coming around now on the guitar, so all together now, “WITH A BROKEN SHOULDER”.

Ever since last summer’s construction project, the cap to the septic tank has been exposed, and Thus Shall It Ever Be, Because We Are Not Going Through That Again.

Except, where exactly is that outlet pipe?

Somewhere around here…

Oh, you should have seen our efforts to peek inside the newly-empty tank to see if we could spot the hole from the inside. I taped a mirror to the end of a shovel…we poked around with a shovel, inside the tank…coat hangers were involved…nada, zip, zilch.

Finally, Kevin hit gold.

So in the picture above…he’s sitting on the heavy-duty plastic lid of the tank, which is itself maybe a foot and a half high – so he’s dug a foot and a half down, just to get to the top surface of the tank, which his feet are resting on. And then another foot or so down, in a four foot arc around the edge of the tank, before hitting the pipe, which is that white-ish thing his shovel is touching.

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE…saved, forever, on the Interwebs, here is where that damn outflow pipe is. SHEESH!

 

We covered it with a tarp for now.

While I do things like, create blog posts, and probe my innermost psyche for demons and whatnot, Kevin gets work done around here. Here’s the current status of the woodpile, for instance.

And here are the cantaloupe and melon plants, going all wild with luxuriant growth.

(You’ll notice I haven’t posted pictures of any of the lettuce or basil. There is a reason for that. I am too shame-filled to discuss it right now.)

Yeah, the only things I’m good at growing would appear to be the things I didn’t intend to grow. This is our compost pile. All that vivid green stuff? Those are potato plants. Some friends of ours came to dinner some months back and brought us a bag of potatoes. We ate most of ‘em, but the few we didn’t get to sent shoots out, which I didn’t discover until this one night I was jonesing for potatoes. Ooops. Into the compost pile they went, and they’ve been very happy ever since.

Now, I HAVE been enjoying other life forms…such as this mystery egg sac that was on the red dandelion leaves from this week’s CSA haul…

This is a first! I wonder what they are…they’ve gone to live on the potato farm. Only one snail today, no slugs. Oh, and I found another snail, on the inside of the compost bucket, up in the filter – presumably from last week.

Last but not least, here was today’s hair-do.

I just want to make my mother proud of me, is all…