OMFG

A friend just shared this video with me and I laughed until I cried. Someone dubbed over the Total Eclipse of the Heart video with lyrics that describe what's actually happening in the video. Which pretty much has nothing to do with the original lyrics.

Enjoy!

Water update

A DPW crew came out first thing this morning, closed off our street and parked a backhoe in front of our house. They spent the whole morning digging a trench, while I took Sadie to the doctor for a strep test.

Hey, it was either that or keep her home from school for seven days with "flu symptoms." I swear this was the first time I was actually happy to hear a diagnosis of strep throat.

By late morning they'd located the buried valve and determined that yes, the pipe leading from the main water service to the street shut-off was in fact 100+ year old galvanized pipe, and it was pretty clogged up. They replaced that whole section with copper, then cleaned out the meter and installed a new gate valve in the basement because the old one had failed.

I feel as if we've headed off some uncertain future catastrophe.

The DPW guys assured us that the 20 or so feet of pipe between the street shut-off and the meter in the basement -- our responsibility to replace at our expense -- is the same crappy, clogged-up, 100-year-old galvanized pipe, so it was anyone's guess whether we'd see any change in the water pressure to our house.

If we want to replace it, they have a list of approved contractors who could give us estimates. It involves excavation; I'm thinking it's going to be expensive, so I'm not in a hurry to do it. But! the tub in the washing machine now fills up approximately four times faster than it used to.

I know this becuase I was planning to gauge the relative success of the endeavor by opening the tap in the upstairs bathroom to see if any water makes it to the second floor while the laundry machine is filling (this has been an issue for as long as we've lived in this house).

In fact, I didn't even make it to the second floor before the tub was completely filled. To be fair, I spent some of the fill time actually loading the clothes into the machine, but it really honestly used to take something like 15 minutes to fill the tub for a large load so I wasn't exactly in a huge hurry. I guess I should have been!

I can't wait to take a shower! I was so busy today dealing with Sadie and the doctor and the pharmacy and work and homework and a baseball game that I never even got a chance. It's definitely time to remedy that situation.