Somebody Hand Me A Shovel

So, this week’s pretty much gone tits up and its only Wednesday afternoon.

Were do I start?  Saturday afternoon, where I spend five hours at work, most of dressed as a giant frog?  Last Monday, when I received a letter from the IRS telling me someone else has used my Social Security Number to get a job?  Last Wednesday, when I had blue streaks put in my hair?  That Friday, when someone finally noticed?  Or I could go with Friday morning, when I was told there were a couple creepers hanging around the station.  I could start Saturday evening, when I deemed pants to complicated and put on a dress for the first time in five years.  Or Sunday morning, when I decided shirts were too complicated and did the same.  How about the nosebleed I had Saturday night that freaked out my friends, or the one I had this afternoon at my psychiatrist’s office that freaked out my psychiatrist?  I could start at yoga last Monday, the local Social Security Office Thursday, or even last week, when my brother opened a phone call with, “So…what are we doing for Mother’s Day?”

But instead, I will start with Friday afternoon, when we discovered a sinkhole forming around a busted pipe in our backyard.  Where the pipe starts or lets out, we don’t know.  It may or may not be connected to another one which the causing the street outside our neighbor’s house to collapse.

Saturday, dad spent the day digging a four-foot deep hole in our backyard to get to the busted pipe and remove the tree root that had grown there.  It had so many capillaries, it looked more like something I pulled from the clogged bathroom drain when my roommate and I both had long hair.

Since he had the pipe exposed, dear ole dad decided he’d use the opportunity to put in a much needed drain at the bottom of the patio.  In digging a path from the patio to the hole, he uncovered another pipe.  This pipe has been identified as part of the elaborate drainage system we use to keep the basement from flooding, but it took some time to come to that conclusion.

He originally decided to tie the new drain into this pipe, but backed off over concerns that the pipe didn’t have a steep enough slope to drain properly.  This is after digging up another six feet of pipe.  I have made repeated offers to help, but have been told things ranging from, “There’s not much you can do right now,” to “You’ll only be underfoot.”  All of which I think are euphemisms for: dad is making this up as he goes.

We have company coming on the 11th for my grandmother’s 90th birthday, the party for which is supposed to be in our backyard.  The same backyard that currently looks like a miniature war zone, complete with foxholes and trenches.

To add to the chaos, they started digging up the collapsing street today to uncover the original builders used a steel pipe of which the bottom has rusted through.  That is not what’s causing the sinkhole though.  The sinkhole is being caused by the connection between the steel pipe and a smaller pipe – a connection made by simply taking the much smaller pipe and setting it inside the much larger pipe, then wedging a rock in between the two to hold them in place.

Idiot is too kind a descriptor.  Rectal-cranial inverted is only a slightly better.

So, the current contractors talking about tearing up whole sections of the street and possibly going into our yard and the neighbor’s as well.

Did I mention we have people who are arrive on the 11th?  Am I the only one stressed out by this?

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