Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Back Yard Archeology, Part II

It's the next day. I'm taking a vacation day to finish this. No pictures this post, but I'll have some good ones later.

I'm taking a break. To come into the house I have to disrobe entirely and put on a robe. Today involves lots of mud. I'm going to have some lunch, with coffee and ibuprofen figuring big.

You might be be thinking, "A day off to finish. I know digging is work, but it doesn't look like that much digging." If you've had to dig around pipes you didn't want to break, particularly gas lines, and in hard ground, you know my delima near the house. The picture from yesterday shows the two gas lines the break is sandwiched between.

If you know caliche, you, will understand my problem at the other end, uncovering the main line. Check out that wikipedia article. It's like concrete. You usually don't hit it till you get down a couple feet, but this spot its top to bottom. That main line was dug up and replaced 4 years ago. That would have broke up the caliche, but it got mixed all through, then we wetted it and tamped it down to reduce settling. Then the water line got dug up last year, and we really worked at wetting, tamping, wetting, tamping, wetting, tamping that area. We succedded. Ugg.

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