Oh, Superman

It's Memorial Day Weekend, but we're not off work. In fact, Neal did the work of three men today.

It started on Thursday, with a fun field trip to the Anacortes pool and parks for Uma and Neal, part of a school field trip. Neal put his truck in line, thinking he'd pick up building materials after the kids got on the bus to head back to Lopez. Not to be. Due to mis-loading on the ferry, he was overloaded. He had to park the truck suddenly and run to the boat. He only made it because of the ruckus caused by the other parents and students, alerting the crew and captain (our Lopez dock attendant chose to ignore him. She's so helpful.) So he was off-island without a vehicle.

I was at work during all this, and went home at 1:00 for a late lunch, thinking I'd head back to finish the day with Lindsey. I walked in, checked the mail, thought about what to make for lunch, and then realized I'd better check messages. There were four from Neal. He had the cell phone, and was trying to contact me to figure out how to get the truck to him. I looked at the clock: it was 1:25. The only boat that could get it to him on time was the 1:35.

I grabbed the extra truck key and ran for my car, not sure what to do, but heading for the ferry. On the way there, I realized that it was Memorial Day Weekend (wacky ferry scene), and that we needed the materials for the excavator that was coming tomorrow.

When I got near the ferry, the last three cars were loading. I made a split second decision: I parked the car next to Neal's truck, got in the truck, and drove it on the ferry just as the gate was closing. In my 12 years on Lopez, this was my least meditated ferry trip ever.

I'm glad I did it: I met up with the school bus with no trouble, and surprised Neal. We found most of what we needed in Anacortes at Frontier (right before they closed for 3 days), and they turned us on to an electrical supply. We made it there 10 minutes before closing, and bought the huge wire needed to connect our power supply to the house. Big gratitude to North Sound Communications, who will be doing our electrical work. They really helped us out with this phase of the work.

Our luck had turned from the morning, and we made it on the 6:35 ferry back to the island, with our load of materials.

Friday morning, we woke knowing we had work to do before Buck came with the excavator. First we laid 4” perf pipe around the foundation for a perimeter drain. Then we pulled out our drawing of downspout locations (done ahead of time, how about that!), and connected 4” pvc pipe to drain the roof water out toward the landscaped area.

We started the excavation day with another dump truck: this time, 10 yards of drain rock. They put it around the foundation, over the piping we had just laid.

When I came home at the end of the day, they had backfilled the foundation and cut the final grade at the north side. Our house looks like it belongs on the land again! Very exciting, to stand at floor level and imagine our finished space.

On Saturday, the site jumped back two steps. Time for more trenching. Two, in fact. One for power/water/phone, and another to the septic. Even knowing that, with luck, they would be filled in on Monday, it is disconcerting to see the trenching and mounding.

Which brings us to Sunday, the day between excavator days. Neal has this one day to lay all of wiring and piping in the two trenches. As he said at the end of the day, “this is too much for one person in one day”. Yes. It was. But he did it, my SUPERman.

ha ha ha ha ha ha (Laurie Anderson, 1981)

Uma and Milo, playing skee-ball septic