Fifteen Years Ago

About this time of night, our families were shooing The (At That Time) Short-Suffering Wife and me off to our hotel. They would help clean up and take care of the tuxes & gowns & presents and so on. Our work for the day was done.

It’s been a good fifteen years. We’re a good pair, we love each other, and we make each other laugh, even after all this time. Usually we’re laughing at stupid stuff that other folks just don’t understand, but that’s fine.

For example…

Yesterday the (Now) Long-Suffering Wife looked up what the traditional anniversary gifts are for fifteen years of marriage – crystal or watches.

How blasé!

Not an inexpensive gift (literally more than we spent on my new car), but for our fifteenth anniversary we each other a completely new sewer system for the house!

Having the entire end down by the street filled with roots is apparently a bad thing.

For the line from the “Y” to the main sewer line under the street, they “shot” this liner in. When inflated to fill the inside of the broken pipe, it’s then heated so the epoxy layers turn hard as a brick. Much cheaper than digging up all of that street, curb, and sidewalk and then rebuilding it all.

From the “Y” up to the house the one line runs under a LOT of cement. Instead of digging it all up, they run this honkin’ big cable through the broken pipe, with this huge nose cone at the end hooked to about 45′ of somewhat flexible 4″ pipe.

At the other end, this big hydraulic ram muckles onto the cable and pulls, about a foot at a time. The nose cone breaks apart the old, clay pipe and forces it outward, dragging the new plastic pipe in behind it. Pretty neat!

Once all is said and done, the far end of the pipe is connected back to the main iron pipes coming out from under the house.

We seem to be missing that tree that’s been there forever. What will we do with those Christmas lights this year?

Back at the “Y”, the top pipe comes from the bedroom end of the house, the one from the right comes from the laundry room & kitchen end of the house, and it all goes off to the left into the pipe with the new liner. They also installed several “clean out” fixtures to make cleaning any future problems MUCH easier.

Easy peasy!

It all disappears underneath the sidewalk, beyond the street, hopefully to never be a concern for us together!

My sister said that there’s nothing romantic about this. I disagree, especially for the two of us. This will last far longer than any flowers or chocolates.

And we now have a sewer system that can flush away a live armadillo! Behold our toilet power!