Many of you don’t have ponds, so you may not know that there is an overflow drain in the dam of our pond. When we returned from Europe in November, we noticed that the pond was higher than usual. We assumed that the overflow pipe was plugged up, so we had our septic tank guy come out to try to unplug it. (Do any of you have your own septic tank guy? Just wondering.) He used some sort of blower that has a jet engine on it, and they could not get anything out of it. This meant that the pipe had probably collapsed and was not going to be opened up again. We called an excavator guy to come and take a look. He told us that the pipe was too small and should not have been a plastic pipe to begin with. Big surprise that it was installed incorrectly! So, guess what we got for Christmas — a new drain pipe! The pipe is 120 feet long and 12 inches in diameter. We had 2 small tractors and a huge excavator in our yard on New Year’s Eve. Since it has been so wet and warm, the tractors really tore up our yard. It was a muddy mess, but now it is all frozen. They tore out the old pipe and put in the new one. It was fun to watch that big tractor in the mud. When they were finished, the guy told us that he was not happy that all the dirt they had to use to fill in around the new pipe was wet and clumpy because it may not settle correctly. He told us that if we got lots of rain before it melted and settled, we might still lose the dam. We really did not want to hear that. We thought we had fixed the problem and were out of the woods. It was our only option, but it is still not safe. It is in God’s hands now. Hang on God!
