Route 153

Crumpling August 29, 2014

This just in, from my 88-year-old boyfriend:

 Thursday night was the turning point. The cancer has won out, and I am now on hospice for a month or two.

Chemo failed.

gmw

Well, Well, Well August 26, 2014

$1,300ish. That’s what it cost me.

But it was fixed the day of my last post.

They weren’t supposed to show up until Thursday, but when I got home from work Wednesday afternoon, they were finishing up.

Turns out the well was in that corner, just not under the slate. They put the new tall wellhead right at the edge of the driveway.

The good news is that they didn’t have to dig up my driveway at all.

The bad news is that the wellhead now exists on a corner I regularly drove over to back out of my driveway. There will be a learning curve.

There will need to be some clear marking of the wellhead so the plow doesn’t take it out this winter. The corner is one the plow also regularly cuts.

Tim and I may have to switch places in the garage. We park the longer car in the tighter spot so that our batteries are side by side. If we switch places, we need much longer jumper cables. Or a portable battery booster.

So there will be more money involved.

But we have water. (I love water!) We know where the well is. The problem was fixed about 30 hours after I called.

I think that’s pretty good.

Well, Well August 20, 2014

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

When I bought this house fifteen years ago, one of the questions I asked the previous owners was “Where’s the well?” There was no visible wellhead anywhere. The answer? “I don’t know.”

This concerned me.

So I called the local well-drilling guys for a consult. One of them was a dowser. He said that the well was under the driveway. The paved driveway.

The driveway hadn’t always been paved. When I first rented the house across the street, most of the driveways in town were dirt. One day someone came and paved a bunch of driveways in the neighborhood, including this one. A package deal, perhaps.

I doubt the previous owners knew the well was there. At least, I hope they wouldn’t knowingly pave over all access to the well.

In the four or five years they lived in this house, they had no trouble. So clearly, the pump in the well is at least nineteen or twenty years old. Obviously, someday it would fail.

That day was yesterday.

Tim ran out of water during his morning shower, but it came back. He did dishes after breakfast just fine. But when I drew a bath, it ran out again. So I called the plumber to (likely) verify my worst fears.

Which he did. But he called the well place for me and was able to explain to them all the electrical tests he had run.

The well guys were out on a job, but the woman in the office said they could come out this morning. Instead, they called late yesterday afternoon and drove over to check out the situation.

I told them that my neighbor, who has been here much longer than I, was convinced that my wellhead was under this huge slate in the corner of my house. The well guys doubted the well would have been dug that close, but they crowbarred the thing and dug down a bit. Nope. No well.

So it’s under the driveway. Somewhere. They will come back with a jackhammer. Tomorrow, not today.

The motor keeps heating up and shutting down. So we’re actually not completely without water—we just can’t do something too big, like shower, and likely we can’t flush too many times. I keep a couple of huge buckets filled with water to deal with flushing if summer storms take out my electricity. I’ll be putting that water to use if I have to.

Last night I showered at my next-door neighbor’s. Tim has access to a shower at his office. Today I’ll hit the gym near work, then shower there. Maybe by tomorrow night we’ll have regular water flow again.

Then I’ll have a driveway to deal with, which will present its own challenges, as we can’t have a wellhead raise above tire level if I want to use my garage. I’ll have to find someone to pave it who can pave around a flat covering in an awkward, tight space.

Frankly, part of me is relieved. I’ve been waiting for this shoe to drop for fifteen years. I have avoided certain projects—repaving the driveway, replacing outdoor stairs—because I didn’t want to just have to rip them up/out when the well died in its unknown location. Tomorrow I should find out for sure where my well is.

I wonder what that will cost me.

At Last August 13, 2014

Yesterday I went to a shop for Certain Underthings, one that I’ve been avoiding because these Certain Underthings almost never fit me properly, but I’d met the proprietor at a wedding reception, and I needed a Certain Other Underthing anyway, and she assured me she could fit me, and I both wanted to be fit for obvious reasons and didn’t want to be because of what I’d no doubt end up spending, but I did go in, and she fit me properly, and as I was trying on Certain Underthings that actually fit, I overheard a conversation with another customer, a woman who had come in looking for a bra to wear under something for a wedding, but she didn’t want to spend more than $20, and this place didn’t have a bra for $20, and she asked about things on sale, not because she couldn’t afford what this place was charging for bras, she said, but because she was from Notsosnootytown about an hour away, and people there just didn’t spend that kind of money for this kind of thing, and then she began to ask about how much was actually being made in this business, and the proprietor noted that well, it was retail, so it could be assumed that said proprietor was paying about half the ticket price for any garment, but the woman said no, she meant that she wondered how much it actually cost to produce the garment, in Sri Lanka or wherever it was happening, because someone was making a lot of money, and the proprietor couldn’t really help her there, and when I walked out of the fitting room and saw the other customers in the store, I recognized one, a woman who used to show up at poetry readings I attended fifteen years ago, a nice woman who nonetheless gives off a bit of a crazy vibe, and I was pretty sure it was she who had had this conversation I’d overheard, but I don’t think she recognized me, and when she left the store I almost said something about her to the proprietor, but thought better of it, and then was glad of it because there were still other women in the store, and maybe it was one of them, and anyway, it didn’t matter, and when I left, now a bit in debt, with my bag of newly purchased Certain Underthings and a Certain Other Underthing, there was the Notsosnootytown woman from poetry readings sitting in a chair at the doorway just outside, and as I walked down the stairs, she called out to me, “I love your haircut! It’s very flattering!” and I thanked her but didn’t tell her I remembered her and was glad I’d kept my big mouth shut.