Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another.
Drop by and tell us about your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper. Newcomers may notice that many who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
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THIS IS AN OPEN THREADNothing is Off the Table
But PLAY NICE!
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#Dirty Music MondayWhy #Dirty Music Monday?
DIrty Water could not possibly better explain a smidgen of my otherwise utterly successful plan to get rid of my septic system and connect to the County wastewater sewer main now running right down my western property line.
x xYouTube VideoFriday (which I personally consider to be part of the weekend) was a flurry of action begun in the late afternoon of Thursday, when First Call Septic arrived to pump my septic tank out prior to decommissioning it.
By 10 am Friday morning the lid was off that 1,000 gallon tank (icky side down), resembling nothing so much as the Elven magic’d Door into Under the Mountain in the 1st Hobbit film; 10 cubic yards of 3/4”minus rock was in one lane of the driveway and 7 cubic yards on the other lane; and 2 huge piles of dirt emerged from the pit dug by JUST TWO GUYS and a back hoe.
These guys:
DKosOrange shirt is the crewman (if he’d been wearing a #RedShirt I would have been worried for his safety) and the Fella in the Trench is a member of the family that owns Precision Paving Plus (if you are in the SW Washington area and need excavation work for anything? Call these guys and ask for Duke Smith. I swear, we discussed the job in detail, he thought he’d be in and out in about 4 hours. When they finished a long 8 and a half hours later, I was worried about that bid I’d gotten and been so happy to see (nearly $5K under the highest bid) before we started. But I should have known better.
standing here, look to your right and down to see the excavated chamber where the sewer line is On the far right, that is a six foot section and the depth of the hole is about 10ft, so you can’t see the rest of the pipe from this angle. On the top left of the photo you can sort of see the edges blunted, where the crewman fell and slide down into the end stepped chamber — while I was standing down at the other end. I had a brief thought of “thank the gods he’s in an Orange shirt!” but he just stood up after hitting the bottom and climbed right back out and brushed off some of the dirt on his ass and went back to work.I’d talked to both of them for about an hour while they were setting up and getting ready to dig the trench in which my lovely new blue Pressure Sewer Line now lies (not ABS pipe but something new that seats with a built-in seal, creating a nice firm, stable seal without any glue at all). It’s been nearly 30 years since I engineered and installed my (now, joyfully) defunct tank and drain field; which I only had to have pumped out 3 times in 30-some years.
Twice due to root infestation from the Willow tree and once due to the previous Honey Wagon pump guy who kicked the baffle off before I could stop him and who assured me it wasn’t necessary, which I believed right up till sewage backed up into the shower WHILE I WAS USING IT. Ugh.
But that is now history for me. No more fears when a whiff of sewage wafts out from the utility room where the washer and dryer are, and where there is an access pipe to stuff the outgoing dirty washer water flex-line into. It’s $38 a month, and that’s $456 a year I never used to have to pay.
But I was able to sell my adjoining pasture lot for enough to pay off my mortgage and my outstanding debt and install the sewer connection and pay this year’s property taxes. For which I may be able to discount any gain under the “sell your primary residence and the first $250K is capital gain tax free” and if not, 30+ years of property taxes, insurance and all of the costs the sale will bring my taxable gain down to something that isn’t scary enough to keep me up even a single night!
On top of which my healthcare insurer (Kaiser Permanente NW region) had me pre-screened and it appears I’m likely to qualify for SSD and/or SSDI (which is disability income and comes with eligibility for Medicare).
So today, I’m feeling a little bit like a superhero immune to Kryptonite, which just so happens to be one of my favorite tunes of the past decade…
x xYouTube Video How was your weekend?