Visions of double stitches dancing in my head.....

Whelp, here I am again..... it's crunch time! (It always seems to be crunch time around here. Hmmm.) Anyway, My first holiday show is in less than a week, so I've been tatting as much as I can manage, taking time out only to do school with my eldest, practice songs for church on Sunday, practice songs for my FIRST EVER LIVE GIG OF MY VERY OWN tomorrow....(I'll tell you guys more about that later)....and also catch up on the three days of laundry and dishes we were left buried under after the septic line was repaired. Darling husband has been an angel, keeping up around the house while also dealing with this hot mess of the line being backed up. The problem started with the washer line overflowing all over, and coming up into the tub and toilets..... and of course what does one do in such a situation? Well, I don't know what everyone else does, but I called a company to come snake the main line (which meant pulling up a toilet). Everything was just fine and dandy until the next day when it happened again. Gee, that must mean the septic must be full, or the drain field isn't working. Whatev. So we just spaced out showers and laundry loads throughout the day to try and bide our time until another paycheck. But then it got worse. So the dear one I am married to dug up the septic cap and peeked inside. Never having seen inside a septic tank before, neither of us knew if what we were seeing was good or bad or worse lol. Thank high heaven, our behind the fence neighbor knows all sorts of stuff about these things, and his comment was...."Gee, that's a lot of dirt in there!" Dirt? DIRT??? What is DIRT doing in there! I knew that the tank had been pumped and repaired when we bought the house.....this was not looking good at all. So, a little more digging, and the guys found some nice squishy soil, and underneath that they found a crushed plastic pipe that once was the line from the house to the tank, and under that they found a bunch of rotten wood. So our best guess is the wood rotted out, and the pipe sank and failed. There was about a foot of pipe that was completely closed off with dirt. Wham bam, a new pipe, and some quick set cement, and we are back in business! (after 24 hrs of shower at the neighbors and mad dashes thru the fence to use their potty of course). And only after we used every single dish in the house....did it occur to me that we could have gotten paper plates for the few days we were having issues. Hindsight being 20/20 and all.... anyway, what's a good story without pictures?!?!

At least the sun came out for my intrepid digger.... that is him standing in the hole he had to dig to get all of the rotten wood some moron put under the pipe.

This is the culprit after being cut away.

And this is how the front yard looked for a couple days while the cement dried and we double checked for leaks. We lost a lovely old rhododendron bush to the process, poor thing had wrapped itself around the damaged pipe.

I'd post tatting pictures, but really, it's mostly stuff you guys have seen before. I have a few new necklaces, but nothing world changing. I will take some pictures at the sale next week.

And I'll tell you all about my musical adventures as well. Another time of course, it's back to the tatting sweatshop for me right now :-)