Of Frogs and Mud and Septic Systems

I am newly convinced that there are tiny tree frogs spontaneously generating in our soil.

It's possible they are actually climbing up from the underworld, but I don't see how. There isn't enough room in the soil for them to be climbing around in there; it's very tightly-packed clay over sandstone. The spontaneous-generation theory seems much more likely. 

The septic system is awaiting inspection on Monday.

It has rained and continues to do so. Not enough to penetrate the ground very deeply, but quite enough to turn the heaps of heavy clay around the trenches into thick, sticky, goopy mud that grabs onto your boots, adding several pounds of weight per foot.

It also sticks to the pipes you're trying to glue together, whilst standing in the mud, in the drizzling rain, trying to get enough of a grip on the slippery plastic to actually get any leverage. This is especially fun if you happen to have any strained tendons in your arms (me), or be experiencing ankle pain (DH). Yep, we're quite the fit-and-hardy team here.

I have never before closely observed a septic system-in-the-making. It's ridiculous; looks just like a puzzle toy I expect my 3-year-old niece and nephew to be playing with, only adult-size. Plastic boxes with various holes in them, into which you have to fit pipes at juuust the right angle, sometimes with the aid of elbow fittings, to fit into other box holes at the other end, and eventually into silly plastic domes-in-trenches, all connected back to a big cement box.

Come to think of it, the whole way septic systems work is weird, and kinda gross. I'll be happy to move on to another project. Even happier if it doesn't involve mud. And happier still when we finally get back to the actual home-building part of this home-building exercise.

The aforementioned big cement box, the septic tank, sits in a very large hole – one we have to use a ladder to climb in and out of. There are tiny little tree frogs down there, whom I saw jumping up at the walls, trying to get out. How the Hades did they get down there, you ask? Unless they spontaneously-generated there, I do not know. Accidentally fell over the edge, like Wile E. Coyote? (Holding up tiny signs saying "Uh, Oh," one presumes).  A rain of frogs? They appear to be burrowing beasts, but who the hell burrows six or seven feet down? They're smaller than a quarter, for cripes sake, and the ground is hard as a rock, and devoid of anything that looks like frog burrows. Incidentally, I also found them burrowing Up inside the crawl space, back when I was smoothing that out. Which could be seen as favoring the climbing-up-from-the-underworld theory, but certainly does not rule out the spontaneous generation theory. We scientific types like to be cautious about interpreting evidence.

I caught one in the septic tank hole, laboriously climbed the ladder hand-less while it determinedly poked its nose between my fingers trying to escape, and let it go in the field, but I was unable to reach three more, who ran away from me into a narrow area behind the tank where I could not fit. Eventually I put a long branch into the hole, hoping they would hop up the branch to freedom. They also appear to hide under the giant cement tank. I really need them to leave before the hole is filled back in. Who knew this business would be so emotionally fraught?

After meditating on the potential miseries of being sick in a travel trailer, we scheduled our flu shots. DH promptly fell ill, and I was close behind. So the shots are still unadministered, but we are back on our feet, if not bright-eyed and sparkling.

The timing was unfortunate, as getting the septic system in needs to happen with great promptness, a fact that DH fretted about even as he lay racked with fever, headache and coughing. Fortunately for us, if not for the general state of the climate, we were experiencing an unseasonal period of warm, dry weather, and it was painful to watch the days slip away without action.

The gods chose to smile upon us, however, and graciously extended the weather break, so as soon as he was on his feet, DH began frantically measuring and calculating, and calling equipment rental places.

He explained, first to our local place, that he needed a 12,000-pound excavator with a smooth (non-toothed) bucket, two feet in length.

(The non-toothed bucket has some specific technical name that I can't recall because my brain remains fogged by the lingering exhaustion of illness. That's my excuse, anyway, and I'm sticking to it.)

The non-toothed bucket also is a good deal less efficient at digging, especially in rock-hard, bone-dry ground, but it has been decreed by They Who Rule The Septic Permits, and one does not lightly defy Them, if one wants one's septic system approved.

They have also decreed that the trenches – which are somewhere around two feet deep and 100(-ish? I think) feet long, vary in depth by no more than a single inch. It was tempting, if intemperate, to inquire whether we also would need to scale a glass mountain, but discretion prevailed: They might have said yes.

At any rate, DH ordered an excavator, and in due course, it arrived.

“Stop!” yelled DH. “That bucket is four feet! I ordered a two-foot bucket!”

“We don't have a two-foot bucket,” the delivery man said.

He took the excavator away again.

DH called more rental places, and found one in a city just about an hour away.

He explained that he needed a 12,000-pound excavator with a smooth (non-toothed) bucket, two feet in length.

Sure, they said. We'll have it there tomorrow morning.

It did not arrive tomorrow morning. They changed the delivery date three times before it finally arrived, while DH gnawed on his knuckles and performed frantic calculations and measurements.

But, at last, it came: A 9,000-pound excavator, with a two-foot bucket.

“I ordered a 12,000 pound excavator,” DH said.

“It's the same basic thing,” the man said.

It is not the same thing. There is a 3,000 pound difference.

“Well, we put them in the same category,” he said.

DH sighed and decided to take what he could get. The smaller, less powerful machine has slowed progress considerably.

I walked down to watch him work one day. When the bucket tries to dig into the (rock-hard, bone-dry) ground, the entire machine tilts forward, because it doesn't have the weight to remain squarely on its treads.

It's rather alarming to watch, and even harder on the operator, who gets banged up and down all day long.

However, progress is being made, and, the-gods-willing, will continue.

We have temporary power; yay!

Nothing to use it on yet, but no matter; another of the endless incremental steps has been completed, and this is happy news.

On to the creation of the septic system! More happy news; it's going to be dry for the next several days, which is just what we need.

Onward we go! -- wait, the builder is sick.

Crap.

Well, I guess we're just gonna hang out here for a bit then.

A nice man in a power company truck pulled into our driveway this morning. DH was out running errands, so I went down to talk to the man.

"I'm supposed to put in temporary power," he said, "but I don't see your main power or your transformer. What have you got going on here?"

"We're building a house, so we don't have main power yet. You can see the foundation there. There's a pad for the transformer down there," I explained, pointing 300 feet down the driveway, "but they haven't put the transformer in yet."

The man rolled his eyes. "Somebody put the cart before the horse again," he said. "About three times a month they get their signals crossed and send me out to put in a temporary power meter before there's a transformer in to hook it up to. I'm sorry, I can't do anything for you. I'll go back and tell them they need to put your transformer in."

"I'm sorry you had a wasted drive," I told him.

"That's Ok, I'm getting used to it," he said cheerfully. He put his truck into reverse and drove it away, beeping. I went back inside to reassure the pets, who hate beeping.

DH, meanwhile, was out driving around to plumbing supply shops in search of "no lead" brass for the water pipe fittings.

No lead, in case you wondered, does not mean "There is no lead in this brass." Lead is an essential component of brass. "No lead" actually means "Well, hardly any."

So naturally that's the thing you put into your water supply system. I'm sure there's a technical reason for that, but I haven't got the energy to look it up right now.

Onward.

Approximately 800 miles of electrical conduit in 10-foot sections have been laboriously painted, first with smelly, toxic weird purple stuff and then with glue at the ends, jammed together until the glue set and dropped into the three-foot-deep trench, all while carefully running a 400-foot long string through them and keeping it untangled and Not letting it get glued into the joints. Much. We did have to cut off one pipe section and redo it, but what's one out of 40-odd?

Also, while not falling into said trench, or purpling or gluing ourselves, or any of the other possible mishaps that could have occurred. Except for that one unfortunate time I dropped the pipe the several feet down into the trench and the curved fiberglass elbow at the other end of it slammed very painfully into DH's ribs.

Oopsie.

Sorry about that. I thought he Said we were supposed to drop the pipe into the trench. Apparently not. He did say some other words, though, after I dropped it...

At any rate, we also glued the bendy elbows onto the ends of the conduit, and ran another 50-foot line of larger conduit from the transformer site to the house, and tied the official pull string required by the power company onto the original string and pulled it through, and covered the conduit with soil, and DH is now building a gravel pad for the transformer to sit on.

All of which left us as out of breath as you are after reading that last sentence.

At one point, as we sat on the edge of the trench panting for breath and contemplating our various aches, DH said, “Isn't this fun? I told you building a house would be fun.”

I didn't have enough breath to laugh.

Keeping the 400-foot long string straight was no end of fun, as it tangled on every single grass and weed stem in its path, and, when it couldn't find anything else to grab, just tied itself into complex knots.

The sequence went like this: We would pick up a 10-foot pipe section, look through it to make sure it was relatively clean, then stuff a long piece of thin plastic pipe, tied to the string, through it, with a rag wadded on the end to clean out dust and cobwebs. We were also making sure that the bell end of the new pipe was facing the narrow end of the other pipe. Then we would hold the new pipe next to the already-glued segment of pipe, and hold onto the string, and DH would paint both near ends purple, then paint them with glue, then I would run to the end of the new pipe to pull the string tight while we both jammed the bell end onto the narrow end and pushed and twisted until they were tightly connected, and held them a few seconds until the glue set, which it did really fast, so there wasn't a lot of time for dilly-dallying. Ten-foot lengths of plastic pipe – er, conduit – get heavy after awhile, and some of this was done from very un-ergonomic positions, owing to the mounds of dirt piled around the trench. My arms got sore and some of DH ended up a little purple.

But the conduit has now been inspected and approved by the power company, so, progress! However, we cannot have power until we have put the water lines into the trench and covered them up so that all the ground is level again. Then the power company will fasten the high-voltage actual power lines to the pull string, pull it through the conduit and install a transformer on the gravel pad by the house.

Getting the water lines in will entail “welding” about 300 feet feet of polypropylene pipe together in 20-foot sections and dropping placing them carefully in the trench, running from the well to the house. You can't, of course, actually weld plastic pipe; instead, you take some special, expensive tool that gets ridiculously hot and melt the ends of the pipe sections and then jam them together so they stick and become one.

Preferably without welding oneself. I dislike these projects that require dangerous cutting or heating implements, but I guess that's why DH is the one who got certified to do the welding.

But first, he's re-digging out the parts of the trench that we accidentally back-filled too much, to get it back down to the correct two-foot depth.

Stay tuned for further adventures ...