the lawn is always greener . . .

Some people have problems with their kitchen sink drains, so they call a plumber, write a check and go on with their lives. We have a problem with our kitchen drain and we spend a weekend doing this.

We have been having problems with our drain - the water from our kitchen sink goes through some piping directly under the center of our house. There is no basement, no crawl space, our house is built directly on a big slab of concrete so there is no access to repair anything under it. After having problems for years, the original 1948 drain pipe finally broke and we had no alternative than to run a new drain line from the kitchen wall, under the driveway, around the side of the house, across the entire back yard and hook into the sewer line. Yay!!

Actually, the pipe broke a couple of months ago, but we simply didn't have the time or energy to fix it right at the moment. So Dave, being the ingenious man that he is, took one of his fire hoses, hooked it to the drain line outside our kitchen wall, and ran it out to the flower bed in the back yard so our sink would drain until we could get to the repair. Wouldn't you think that a little oatmeal rinsed from a bowl down the sink, or maybe a little tomato soup or whatnot that gets rinsed off our dishes would be good for a garden? It's just water from the kitchen sink. Shouldn't be too bad, right? If that is what you think, you would be wrong. We we ended up with an unexpected toxic situation with a smell that defies explanation. I don't know what happens to oatmeal when it travels 60 feet through a hose, but it comes out NASTY! We lost a handful of plants in our garden, and we have a mud pit that no one can go near for the smell. I may have to let nature run it's course and do what it has to do for a couple of weeks while it dries out before I can weed the area and replant it and get it back to normal.

Dave came in at the end of the day exhausted, dehydrated, and sore. But I have some photographic evidence that he pulled a little "Tom Sawyer" trickery on Melanie. "Really, Melanie . . . it's FUN! Just come try it!" (Actually it was a cool little machine, we probably could have got many kids from the neighborhood to come do some of the digging if we had thought it through better.)

Don't think for one second that if you show up to our house on a workday afternoon wearing a shirt and tie, that you will be excused from ditch digging duty. (Sorry Missionaries - glad to have you come to lunch, but I should have warned to to wear your work shoes)

Or if you are a teenager and coming to our house to hang out with our kids, nope . . . you are not excused either.

So what used to be a nice green lawn yesterday morning, is now not so nice or green today. But hey, -- I should show you a picture of how nicely our kitchen sink drains now!