I have recently come into contact with a very inspirational woman, Erika Liodice, who runs a website called 'Beyond the Gray' (www.beyondthegray.wordpress.com).
Erika wants to inspire people to follow their dreams. She kindly invited me to be interviewed for her website because she had heard of my recent decision to take 12 months off paid employment in order to follow my dreams.
I feel very humbled and grateful for the interest that Erika has shown in me and I would be hugely happy if my words are able to give any of Erika's readers the tiniest piece of wisdom to follow their dreams...
The interview can be found at www.beyondthegray.wordpress.com/category/interviews-with-dream-chasers/
Now, for those of you who read my Blog for the sole reason that it makes you feel grateful for your sewerage system, read on...
Today was a warmer morning (4 degrees). We woke bright and early because we wanted to be ready for the drainlayer.
He arrived exactly on time at 8.30am. We expected a drain-dwelling sort of person with grime under his fingernails. Instead, we got a very stylish man who wore designer clothes and clean white runners and looked more like a fashion designer!
What sort of drainlayer comes to a job like that!!?? We were immediately suspicious.
As we stood proudly over the hole that we'd dug, he tip-toed around taking extreme care to avoid discoloured areas.
Then he told us to do some more digging and marked out the area he wanted us to dig. He would return at 2pm to reassess the situation.
Stu had been looking forward to doing something that didn't involve digging. But we really had no choice, so we dragged on our work clothes and boots and got started. I'm not sure how Stu dug so continuously today because, right from the first showel-load of dirt that I tilted into the wheelbarrow, my wrists seemed to go limp.
A couple of hours later, we had a bigger hole but we had also found a continuation of the broken sewer pipe which seemed to indicate that it went straight past the septic tank! But where?
Being amateur drainlayers, we assumed that when the drainlayer returned he would want us to dig in the direction of the newly discovered extension to see where it went.
So we continued digging.
At noon, the drainlayer arrived, two hours earlier than expected.
He tip-toe around again, then picked up a shovel and started to prise up a protective cement cover that lay over the broken sewer pipe. He discovered another hole into which a stormwater pipe had been forced. Nothing had been cut neatly, sealed or joined properly and ooze leaked out from all around the hole. He pulled at the stormwater pipe until it came out. It had been thrust into the sewer pipe so that only a narrow channel remained in the sewer pipe. No wonder our sewer was backed up!
As another explosion of backed up sewerage oozed out of this hole, he quickly walked a couple of metres further along the septic pipe, then drilled a hole.
'Niente! Non pieno!', he called. Nothing. Empty.
Apparently, that side of the sewer pipe was empty. He had identified the location of the blockage.
He told us to cut the entire section out (from the leak that Stu found yesterday to the stormwater hole that he'd found today) and he would return at 2pm to reconstruct it.
m afraid the stench was too much for me so I again stood outside my 5 metre radius while Stu cut through the sewer pipe in two places, then emptied it, then redirected the contents to a dam he'd created for the purpose.
Then we waited.
When the drainlayer returned at 2pm, we were refilling some of the superfluous holes we'd dug (we like to think of them as 'exploratory holes').
He opened the back of his 4WD, extracted eight orange PVC pipes and started to measure the gap Stu had created. At one stage, he came dangerously close to contact with the ooze. But this was properly avoided by a quick trip to his car where he extracted a pair of soft white gloves. He now looked like a fashion designer who did a bit of surgery on the side.
We watched as he measured, cut, matched, joined, placed and glued a new maze of pipes for us.
Tonight we spent a long time in our bathroom. Aahh! There's nothing quite like the pleasure of running hot water that drains away properly...
STOP IT. STOP IT NOW. I CANNOT READ ANY MORE OF THIS.
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