Simply Norma

On a beautiful sunny afternoon, I stepped outside all decked out in my mosquito gear (jeans, long sleeve shirt and hat) along with my mosquito cologne (deet) to work in the yard.

Making sure my small wagon had all the supplies I needed, I headed to the back of the house to weed. What a perfect day, I thought to myself, as I started my weeding.

After an hour or so I looked around and decided that perhaps I needed a larger shovel so I headed back to the garage.

Walking to the front door of the garage, I noticed a turkey “hanging out.” Uh, no, I don’t think so. I waved my arms and scared it away. That was easy ~ or so I thought.

After making sure the turkey ran well into the woods, I grabbed my shovel and headed back to do more weeding. Feeling quite accomplished at the work I had completed in a couple of hours, I put everything into my wagon and headed back to the garage to put my tools away.

Then I noticed “it” on the ground.  A white blotchy substance made a path into my garage. Hmmm …

What could that be?

Putting the wagon away, I followed the “path” into the garage. Next to the car. Next to the bicycles. Back to the shop.

Then my eyes followed the path up a table where she was …

Sitting on top of my deck cushions was the largest meanest looking turkey who had made a “poop” path.

Uh, okay, what do I do now? I knew that this required much deep thinking …

At first, I tried reasoning with the turkey and scolded her for being in the garage.  Then I pointed to the garage entrance and asked her to leave. “Go on” I said in my stern (probably incomprehensible) voice.  After a few minutes of coaching, I came to the realization that this was not going to work. (Uh, you think?)

Naturally I put my thinking cap back on and thought about this logically.

Let’s see now ~ turkeys have wings and, as I’ve observed, don’t fly much which makes them similar to chickens. Of course!  What a bright idea I had!

In the shriek-i-est voice I could muster, I clucked. And clucked … and clucked … and, hmmm … I don’t think the clucking was working very well as I was getting very odd looks from this turkey.

Okay so I had to think a little deeper. I mean, I had to really think like a turkey. (hahaha)

I finally thought I had the solution to my problem.

In my shriek-i-est voice I clucked again but this time I flapped my arms and started walking out of the garage. I tried this several times as I thought about the story of the Pied Piper who used a magic pipe to lure rats away from a town. I did this for, oh, ten minutes or so. (Where is a camera to make a video for YouTube when you need it?  This probably would have garnered a million views ~ yes?)

Well, do you think it worked?

Sorry to say, all the turkey did was turn its head from one side to the other trying to figure out what I was doing.  At least I made it think, no?

I was down to my last resort ~ waiting til my husband came home from work in a half hour.

And husband was quite bold about the whole matter. He simply took the end of a broom and poked it gently and this HUGE turkey flew out of the garage.  You should have seen the wingspan on that thing!

So ~ what’s the lesson in all of this?

Never ~ ever ~ try to think like a turkey.  (laughing)

 

We were having water “issues” for quite awhile ~ stinky smelling water, rusty water, etc. I knew in my gut something was wrong as our neighbor across the street told us his water is clear and good-tasting.

So it was that one morning my husband woke me up and said “We have no water.” Blearily I got up to check and, yes, we had no water (now, why would I have doubted him?). I’m not sure what type of help I could be but, hey, gotta support the husband. I called our home warranty company and they told me they would have a contractor call me to come take a look.

In the meantime, husband headed downstairs to where the water heater, water softener, etc. are located and turned the water softener on and off.  Whala!  The water came back.  So, I sheepishly called the home warranty company back and canceled the appointment.

The water seemed to have very low pressure though and throughout the day I tried to conserve as much water as I could. The next morning we woke up to no water again.  Bah!

A not-so-quick call to our home warranty company and within a couple hours I had an appointment for someone to come to see what the problem was.

Sure enough ~ the well water pump had to be replaced.  And so our journey began.

Below is a picture of the well cap which goes over the casing that has the pipes that go to the well pump. The company will remove this cap and have to pull pipes from here to get to the water pump.

Here’s a picture of the men working to remove the well cap and getting the truck ready to remove the pipes from inside the casing.

The top of the truck had this long “tower” that has a cable on it so each pipe can be pulled out since the well is approximately 179 feet deep.

The first pipe came out easily, was galvanized and looked quite clean.

A large wrench was used to turn the galvanized pipe to help with its removal.

The rest of the pipes were made of PVC material.

The further down the pipe was the dirtier it looked as it was removed.

The wrench was quite helpful in removing one pipe from another.

And sometimes more than one wrench had to be used.

The cable was quite long and each time one pipe appeared it was removed from the cable and set to the side.

Notice how the pipes are joined together.

Here are a couple of the PVC pipes.  As they were pulled up the men would use their gloved hand to remove the water & rust that came up with it.

Look at how black the last pipe appears.  It is attached to the well pump.

And here is the well pump which is 4 inches.

I guess after 22 years it’s bound to get dirty, no?

Here’s a close up of the well pump.  In laymen’s terms ~ yuck!

Unfortunately, well pumps can’t be cleaned.  I wonder why that is? Perhaps since it takes so long and costs so much to remove them it makes more sense just to replace them.

This is just gross looking to me.  Normally (well, okay, maybe it’s not normal) I would ask a contractor to leave the part so I can inspect it but I wasn’t sure how I would dispose of it later so I didn’t keep the old well pump.

And tada!  Here’s the new one.

The pump has to go back down in the casing along with the pipes they pulled out.  Uh, of course!  (laughing)

It looked so pretty I hated to see it go down into that deep dark pit …. (laughing)

But, down it went!

It had to be attached to the cable to guide it down the casing. And, wouldn’t you know it?  It didn’t fit.  Argghhhh!

Because of all the guck in the well casing, they had to change out the 4″ well pump for a 3″ well pump.

And down it went … I felt sorry for the gentleman on the phone with the home warranty company as he was on hold practically the whole time he was working which was over 45 minutes.

The PVC pipe now had to be connected to the well pump one pipe at a time.

They used what I believe to be electrical tape to make sure the pipes stayed together.

Here’s a close up of the cable contraption.

A hose was attached to a spigot so that they could make sure that all the nasty water was taken out.

They started pumping the water out of the well and …

Black gold! We struck oil!  Naw, just kidding …

And now ~ it’s clear!  Success!  They allowed the water to flow for about 15 minutes to make sure it stayed clear.

The last pipe had to be placed before they put the well cap back on.

 

And that is how they replaced the well pump.  Whew!!!

I told my husband this looked easy to do but who wants to pay for an expensive truck with a long cable that will sit around until you need it once every 15 or so years?

This was quite an adventure for me and I’m grateful that the contractors allowed me to take pictures.  Quite fascinating!

It’s been a little over 4 weeks since I’ve posted anything new.

Summer has been both “slow” and also gone by quickly.  I spent a couple of weeks preparing for guests and another two weeks with guests in the house. During that time I did minimal yard work, cooking and little of anything else except being a hostess.

Not sure what I’ll be doing about yard work as the weather here has been hot and humid.  It didn’t help that I got bitten by three ticks.  Ughh.  We got them off almost right away but I still have the fear of getting Lyme disease which the black legged ticks can transmit.

Unfortunately? the three ticks I had were really small ~ nymphs they are called ~ so I couldn’t see their legs.  I’m considering going to the doctor to get tested for Lyme disease as a “just in case.”  It can be treated with antibiotics but only if it’s caught early.

I don’t really have any symptoms although lately I’ve had a sinus headache, backache and have felt tired.  I can also attribute that to the weather though.

Right now it feels like we are living in a dense forest.  With all the rain we’ve had in Minnesota, we are no longer in a drought and all of the saplings have become young adults (hahaha ~ that’s my attempt at a joke).

Seriously though, we probably have 15 saplings that need to come down and 5 really large trees that also must come down. It has to happen because I can’t live in darkness.  All this shade makes me somber and lethargic.

Fortunately, for my birthday this summer my husband asked me what I wanted and I told him I wanted a bunch of trees felled and, guess what?  He agreed!  Yippity do da!

The areas on our property that I cleared last year of buckthorn and of the garlic mustard plant look pretty good this year. Well, at least the buckthorn didn’t grow back but the garlic mustard continues to prosper much to my dismay. I have used 2 large containers of Roundup this year to kill this weed but unfortunately I may wind up purchasing another container before summer is over.

So ~ since summer has been kind’ve lazy, I haven’t been trying new recipes. That should change here come September.

I have a backlog of things to share that have been happening so ~ stay tuned.