Life is often funny. It is also often frustrating, maddening and stressful, joyful, boring, exciting, and any other number of emotions that could describe your life either in the moment or the extended moment. It is a gift, regardless of circumstances, although at times it is hard to focus on the ‘gift’ part. Life is a Highway. It is a quandary, something we all want to share with someone special. I am lucky in that regard. I get to share it daily with the people I love the most.
That’s not saying, however, that it is always a bowl of cherries. Not even close. Last week, I had me a day that I can only describe as a Country Song. In fact I even wrote lyrics to this particular day. Allow me to elucidate:
It was Wednesday. This is the day most of us working a fairly regular schedule call ‘Hump Day’. It started as per usual. I got up at around 6 a.m. Brushed my teeth. Scratched my dogs as they always greet me enthusiastically. Hugged my wife and grabbed her buns. Took my daily meds. Got dressed. Woke up my youngest son at 6:30 to get hi day started. While I was putting some dirty laundry in the laundry room in the basement, my son mentioned that the toilet wasn’t flushing too well. I jokingly told him to stop eating so much cheese. I flushed, and while it seemed slow, it appeared to work okay. He mentioned the shower drain kind of backed up when I did this. I wasn’t really listening to this part. It didn’t seem important.
I trudged off to work and began that component as per usual. My wife always calls me at 7:30 on her way to work, and this day was no different. ‘Hello, Love!’ she said. ‘The fridge seems to be a little warm.’ ‘No problem.’ I responded. I will get things going at work, then just go and check what was going on. Al the while, in the back of my mind, the toilet/shower drain thing kept bumping and poking at my thought pattern.
We live in a country home. A country home means we have a septic system. Half our house drains directly into the septic through the plumbing. Our kitchen on the main floor, and our laundry room and downstairs bathroom drain into an effluent pump which then pumps this stuff into our septic. Gravity pretty much demands this: water goes downhill, and since our basement is lower than our septic, a pump is required. We call the room it is in the ‘shit pit’. It’s how we roll.
So…..I get home to check the fridge. It’s broken. So I transfer our food to the spare fridge, and throw away anything rotten. I got this done. Then went to just make a quick snow removal job in our driveway with my John Deere. The belt and pulley broke. Oh Hump day was starting to be a doozy. So I went inside to call my John Deere guy. As I am on hold, I notice an odor coming from the basement. So I walk downstairs, follow my nose, open the shit pit room door. And found out why the drains weren’t working the best….the pump was dead.
Without getting into all the details as to what the process involved with fixing this, I will however tell you that at one point I was shoulder deep in poop. Literally. Twelve trips up the stairs with the shop vac just to make enough room to get to the pump itself. My dogs stayed away (except for Bob, the incurably curious Schnauzer we have). It took 4 hours of hard, unwanted work to get to the point where things were draining again. Another two hours to clean and deodorize the house. Interspersed in this time was a load of swearing and cussing and invective comments.
We’ve all had days like these. This day was my Country Song. The fridge broke. My tractor broke. My poop pump broke. I would have added a guitar solo in there but my hands were a little stinky and dirty. My family got home just in time to help finalize the cleaning process.
It was a shitty day.
Bill's Musings 