A little glitch in the week . . .

You know how "the-week-before-Christmas" is . . .lots of planning, last minute shopping, baking, wrapping?  Well all of those activities came to halt for me on Wednesday when we awoke to water bubbling up from the ground.  There was a small lake in the drive and a nice little spring outside our pump house.  After an emergency service call by a pump guy, we found out what we thought it was, it wasn't.  (Isn't that just how plumbing things go?)  Our house is the original homestead house, and the house next door was my home as a teen-ager.  When we built that home, we didn't dig a well; we just hooked into grandma and grandpa's.  Later, when my dad and his wife thought they might like to sell the house, they needed a well of their own, but they decided to keep the line between the houses in case either of the houses had pump failure.  It was ingenious.  A valve at our end controls the flow back and forth.  It was a great blessing when our pump failed; we would have been without water for the 3 weeks it took to repair it if we hadn't been able to take water from the neighbors.  Unfortunately, even though the valve has been shut off for many years, the water pressure from the house next door remained, and when the piece of pipe sprung a leak . . . well, these pictures say it all.

Thankfully, the neighbors were cooperative about the whole mess (their water was off for about 3 hours while we dug up the leak and capped it . . .) And thankfully, the leak was where we dug the first hole (that doesn't always happen . . .) And thankfully, I had someone else's muscle to dig the hole (although he wasn't all that thrilled to work in the mud with rain/snow adding cheer to the project . . .)  Everything is still pretty gushy out there, but we made it through the event and could finish getting ready for Christmas.  Whew!