"Hey, Vern. You're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever."

A few years ago, while visiting my home town of Starkville, Mississippi, I happened to be in a DVD retail store with my buddy Joe. There I spotted a true gem from my childhood. It was The Essential Ernest Collection, starring Jim Varney as his most famous character Ernest P. Worrell. Now if you're old enough to remember Ernest, it's likely from the Ernest movie series of the 1980s and 90s, such as Ernest Goes to Camp, Ernest Scared Stupid, etc. And the Essential Ernest collection does contain two of those films, Ernest Goes to Africa and Ernest in the Army. However, Varney had been doing the Ernest character for a long while before it spun off into movies.

Ernest started as a staple of TV advertising, with Varney working for a ad agency out of Nashville, using Ernest to pitch any number of different products around the south and beyond, always using the "Hey, Vern, knowhutImean?" schtick. (His director at the ad agency would eventually go on to direct the Ernest films.) For those unfamiliar--and I don't know whether to pity you or be envious of you--the Ernest P. Worrell character was a good-natured yokel type who was constantly pestering his nearly unseen neighbor Vern. (The commercials were filmed from Vern's silent perspective, so the most you ever saw of him was a hand.) Usually, the set up was that Ernest would pop up at Vern's open kitchen window and yammer on until Vern got sick of him, slammed the window on his hands and closed the blinds. Or sometimes Ernest would pop up to a second story window on a ladder to annoy Vern from a height, that usually ended in Vern pushing the ladder away from the house. There were several other such setups and variations on those setups and they ran for years.

Varney did other acting work as well. He was a regular on the legendary talk show parody Fernwood Tonight and its sequel series America 2 Night. I don't think I saw any of those, but I did see a short lived TV series he was in called The Rousters, which I watched quite a bit, and was particularly taken with Varney's work. And I was aware of his Ernest Character around the same time because his ads would frequently turn up on Dick Clark's TV's Best Commericals specials.

Before making the leap to the big screen in Ernest Goes to Camp, Varney tested the waters with a few shorter, non-advertising pieces to see if Ernest might have legs outside of the 30 second format. I think these were all released direct to video, though they could have been shown on TV for all I know. One of those, which I was delighted to find collected on the Essential Ernest set, was called Knowhutimean? Hey Vern, It's My Family Album.

The basic setup of Family Album was a framing sequence in which Ernest pesters his friend Vern, as usual, recycling many of the bits they'd come up with in the ad campaign, minus the product pitch. Instead, Ernest was trying to show Vern his family album, which allowed them to cut away to show five or so 10 minute shorts with Varney playing some of Ernest's relatives from the past.

From junior high through high school, I had to have watched Knowhutimean? Hey Vern, It's My Family Album half a dozen times. It probably built slowly, with me and my sister first watching it, then one or two of my friends seeing it separately, then recommending it for group movie night, then re-renting it when other friends who hadn't seen it yet joined for the next movie night, then re-re-re-renting in college it just for shits and giggles, etc. And lines from it became some of the most quoted among our group. ("Ruth, what are we pretendin' we're having for supper tonight?" " "Daddy? You gonna rock me to sleep? Here, daddy, use my rock." And, of course, the immortal "Did you sayum, Luke?")

After purchasing that DVD set, I put it in my Magic bag (where I keep all my Magic: the Gathering cards) and returned home with it unwatched. And because I pretty much only play Magic while hanging out with Joe when I go home to Starkville, I had no cause to open the bag for around another year. So I was happily surprised, a year later, when I found the set again while unpacking my cards in Starkville. Didn't watch it then, either. In fact, I think I probably carried that bag with that DVD set back and forth from year to year for at least three years and the DVD remained unwatched. Eventually, I removed it from the bag and put it with the rest of my DVDs, which also don't get watched.

This year for Thanksgiving, Joe and his family drove up from Mississippi to Borderland. Joe now has two kids, a four year old and a one year old, both wildly intelligent kids that we're mighty proud to have as godchildren. Before they arrived, not yet knowing just how addicted his oldest kid is to Little Big Planet, and how he would spend nearly every waking moment for four days hounding me to play it with him, I went through my DVDs in advance to see if there was anything appropriate for kids to keep them busy if need be. (I went ahead and buried Tideland in the back yard, not only to protect the children but also to protect ME. Don't let me dissuade you from watching it, but just know that when Terry Gilliam comes on screen BEFORE the movie to warn you that what you're about to see is, to the minds of a LOT of people, seriously EFFed up, he's not playing around. I mean, it's not quite Eraserhead EFFed up, but it's somewhere between there and, say, Trainspotting EFFed up. It's also strangely uplifting, from a certain warped perspective.) And there it was, my Ernest DVD set. I told the wife of my plan and she approved, since my father-in-law is a fan of Ernest as well.

The Friday night after Thanksgiving, everyone looking for something to do together, my wife announced we were sitting down to watch Ernest Goes to Africa.

"Oh, no," I said. "We're watching Ernest's Family Album." I'd been jonsing to sit down and show this gem of comic gold to my family and friends. Oh, the laughs we would have. It would be the hit of the holiday season.

"Fine. Whatever," she said.

And so everybody settled back, I popped in the DVD, settled down on the floor in front of the fire and set my eyes to watching a film I probably haven't seen in at least 20 years. And after half an hour, I realized what a horrible mistake this probably was. Yes, thirty minutes in and I'd had maybe MAYBE three laughs. The rest of the time I was tensely sitting there wondering why this damn movie wasn't nearly as funny as I remembered it being, and how most of the punchlines could be seen coming from a goodly distance. My film-lover's perspective began noticing how the framing sequence was kind of redundant in places, and how the pacing of the stories was more than a bit drawn out. How had this been so beloved by me and my friends? Oh, that's right, we were young and stupid.

This is not to say that the film is not without its good points. The first two stories are definitely the best of the lot, though, (which is why I'm including them here via YouTube) . Particularly Ernest's Uncle Lloyd, which is the funnier of the two and contains most of my favorite lines that we used to quote. After these, though, the returns begin to diminish greatly and the squirms begin to set in. Or at least they did in me, being the guy who had insisted on everyone being subjected to it. The last two stories in the film are by far the worst. I think sum total I had probably five or six moderately good laughs and not much else.

I didn't wait for the credits to end before turning it off. I felt stung.

"Wow. That was... great... babe," my wife said dryly. I wanted to throw it in her face that Ernest Goes to Africa wouldn't have been any better, but after what we'd just witnessed I had no real proof of that. No one else said much. No one else left in the room, that is. It seemed my mother-in-law had snuck away to bed at some point during the run and my father-in-law disappeared quickly thereafter.

"Yeah. I think I can wait another 20 years before watching that again," I said.

I don't mean to crap on Jim Varney, who I still think was a very talented man. I have fond memories of at least two of the Ernest movies, as well as his Saturday morning kids show featuring Ernest and a cast of other Varney characters. (Doctor Otto is wonderful and I don't care who hears me say it.) But be warned: Beloved things from your childhood can be dangerous to revisit while wearing contemporary glasses.

This story reminds me of another story, which also involves Ernest P. Worrell and godchildren, er, sort of...

And in telling this tale, I will be staking my proof of concept claim to an idea that I had during college. I'm not going to go so far as to claim it was a good idea, but it was definitely an intriguing concept. It was thus: The Ernest/Godfather Film Festival.

That's right. At some point in one of my junior years, I announced to my friends that what we should do is hold the first annual Ernest/Godfather Film Festival in which we stock up one of our apartments with unwholesome snacks and drinks, put Dominoes on speed dial, then set about to watch Ernest Goes to Camp followed by The Godfather Part I. Then, because there are far more Ernest films than Godfather films, we'd order the pizza and watch Ernest Saves Christmas and Ernest Goes to Jail. Then, after the pizza arrived (our Dominoes was EFFing slow), we'd hit Godfather II, Ernest Scared Stupid, and Ernest Rides Again. Then, if anyone was still non comatose, we'd fire up Godfather III, which would fix that pretty handily. If anyone was alive and present after that, we'd put on Ernest Goes to School, and Slam Dunk Ernest. (This was 1995, mind you, so Ernest Goes to Africa and Ernest in the Army had not been released yet, otherwise we would have worked them in as alternates, should Movie Gallery not have all the others.) Anyone surviving to the end of the 20 plus hour festival would win a prize, which would probably be the choice of either a VHS copy of Godfather III or a beating. Most, I'm certain, would choose the beating.

While I think we considered attempting such a festival, we never actually did. We just threatened to. But it was a funny enough concept that it made the rounds and eventually came back to me from a friend of a friend of a friend, who had by then become my friend. The subject of Ernest had come up somehow and the new friend told Joe and me about the Ernest/Godfather film festival, attributing its authorship to our other friend, the infamous Mark Chow.
"Oh, no," I said. "I'm afraid that one's mine."

Now that I think about it, perhaps this would be a good film festival topic for a charity fund-raising event, kind of like a walk-a-thon, but worse. People could pledge donations based on the number of survivors. And with two more Ernest films available now, we're looking at probably a day long event.

You are, of course, welcome to try your own version at home. But you have to kick my cut upstairs.

Bucket List Item #182, checked off

My wife and I love the show Oddities on the Science Channel. For those who don't get the Science Channel, Oddities is a reality show that highlights the customers of and potential item sellers to an East Village antiques and oddities store called Obscura, which sells truly strange and interesting things. The show kind of revolves around customers either asking for specific items that the shop owners have to then try and find, or people coming in to try and sell odd items to the shop--sort of like Pawn Stars, but with WAY more embryonic mutants in jars. And usually the big reveal of whatever massively interesting thing they're about to show takes at least two commercial breaks and requisite cliff-hangers to actually get revealed.

Being a very odd place, Obscura attracts very odd people the likes of whom I haven't seen since my days working for the "liberry". Our favorite of the regular customers on the show, however, is a man named Edgar Oliver. He's an actor, poet and playwright who frequently visits the shop to pick up odd items for use in his plays or for decoration at his house. In manner, he comes across as not only very eccentric but as kind of an off hours version of a late night horror movie host, minus the ghoul makeup and with a bright and cheerful disposition. His real claim to fame on the show, however, is for his first appearance in which he was shown staring up in wide-eyed awe at an item on the wall of Obscura and uttering the now immortal phrase "Is that a... ssstraightjacket?" (See video.) His delivery of the line was too perfect. It utterly encapsulated his essence of joyous eccentricity in four simple words.

Now, allow me to be clear: while Edgar often seems to be in the market for items tinged with potential macabre, my wife and I do not find Edgar himself at all creepy, nor do we take any ironic or mean-spirited joy at his presence. We truly find him to be a hoot just as a person. We imagine that he's probably an extremely nice man. And beyond our love for the show itself, we adore episodes where he appears. We can't help but smile during the show's weekly opening, as Edgar's straightjacket footage is replayed and we have literally clapped our hands in glee when seeing him walk through the shop's door, cause Edgar always adds the right amount of odd spice to any given episode. (BTW, I now claim trademark on Odd Spice cologne. Smells like a dusty straightjacket with a hint of clove.)

The wife and I have long been discussing a potential trip to New York City, and within the past year we've stated that when we go we will have to swing by Obscura and pray it's on a day that Edgar is visiting. In our fantasy, he's there, it's lunchtime and we offer to take him out for a bite, just to chat and learn about his life, his work and absorb some of that Edgarocity. He'd be a fascinating figure beyond his Oddities appearances, as the man is an accomplished playwright and actor (even appearing in an odd little film that I enjoy called Gentleman Broncos). (YouTube also has quite a number of non-Oddities Edgar interviews and videos.)

Not long after our fantasy of My Dinner With Edgar began, I hit upon a Bucket List worthy idea.

"I want to see what Edgar's house looks like," I said.

Keep in mind, this was said months ago, as we were enjoying the last episodes of the first season of the show, as collected by our faithful DVR. The idea of getting a peak at Edgar's home, which you just knew would be a direct reflection of the man himself, was a truly delicious notion.

This week, we had that bucket list item come true.

No, alas, we didn't go to NYC, visit Obscurra, meet Edgar in person, have dinner with him, get invited back to his crib and get to tour its majesty ourselves, and have Edgar give us five monies. Instead, Edgar's house came to us via a recent sneak preview episode of the upcoming season of Oddities, again faithfully captured by our DVR. In this Edgar-filled episode, Edgar Oliver comes to the shop to inquire about the purchase of some scientific laboratory equipment--kind of mad-scientisty sort of stuff. Mike and Evan, the owners of the shop, go on a road trip to a medical equipment museum and buy some extras the place's owner had on hand. Then, instead of Edgar coming to the shop to look over the selection, Mike and Evan... GO TO EDGAR'S APARTMENT TO BRING THEM TO HIM!!!! When we saw that pre-commercial cliff-hanger, my wife and I could not have been more excited when we realized what we were about to see, and we couldn't fast forward through the commercials fast enough.

After the commercial, we eventually saw a shot of Mike and Evan standing outside of a plain apartment door, waiting for Edgar to open it from within. My wife and I steeled ourselves, bringing out hands up into prime gleeful clapping position. Then the door opened and we immediately saw that our assumption of what Edgar's apartment would look like--which is to say, wall to wall Addam's Family--was pretty far off the mark from its reality.

It was a perfectly nice apartment, tastefully appointed, clean and respectable with some wood paneling. There was not a hint of the macabre to be seen on first glance through the door. Nor, upon further glances as Evan and Mike were led into the apartment proper.

"Awww," we collectively said. The apartment could not have been more disappointing from our point of view. We wanted to see a place furnished floor to ceiling in all the strange and unusual items that Edgar has no doubt been purchasing from Obscura for decades. Instead, what we saw was a bright, clean and cheerful-looking apartment of modest size (though far larger than the typical one room NY efficiency apartment). Other than an interesting looking shelf, glimpsed at one point, there wasn't a stitch of the odd to be seen.

The Oddities crew showed Edgar the lab equipment they had found and he chose some pieces for it that fit in his stated budget. And then, as Evan noted, because he had only recently moved into this apartment, she gave him a housewarming present.

Wait, wait, wait? We collectively thought. This was a new apartment. That meant Edgar had previously had a different apartment. Immediately my mind began to blaze with possibilities. What event had caused Edgar to have to move? Did he need to move to less expensive digs? Was he evicted from a former place? Was the old place swallowed up by a dimensional vortex and sent to a hell-like realm after Edgar managed to summon the King of the Cabbage Demons during a wine-soaked evening drawing pentagrams with bone chalk? The possibilities! OH, THE POSSIBILITIES!

And, as it turns out, MY MIND WAS ON EXACTLY THE RIGHT TRACK. In fact, from the article linked here, the reality of Edgar's former home on East 10th Street, in New York's East Village, far outstrips anything I had come up with in my bucket list dream vision of what his place might be like. And it was a place populated not only by Edgar himself, but many other even stranger people, some of whom were frequently homicidal!!! The place sounds like the annex of an asylum, but it was a place Edgar loved dearly until he had to leave it. If you're an Oddities fan, a fan of Edgar, or just a fan of fascinating human beings, this is a must-read article. It offers more than a few hints as to how Edgar Oliver came to be so unique in outlook and manner. And there are other such articles to be found as well.

Now that I've freed up a space on the bucket list, I think its replacement shall have to be Seeing Edgar Oliver perform his one man play about that former home. Have to keep my ears peeled. That would no doubt be well worth a trip to the city. Until then, I'll have to make do with clips like this...

Sweet merciful turd on a shingle...

At the risk of losing more readers, another home improvement project has been thrust upon me.

However, after the boring-ass well tank epic, I just don't have the energy to follow this rabbit down the hole and attempt to chronicle it. The last such chase did not end nearly as dramatically as I imagine anyone would have wanted.

Instead, you guys can make up your own awful adventure based on the photo below.


Optionally, here are some elements you may choose to incorporate:

1. There was an incident with a botched front door deadbolt installation for which I was in no way responsible--though I would have, in all likelihood, botched it just as badly had I been there to assist;
2. the purchase of a replacement door was subsequently required;
   
3. we've never done a door installation of this magnitude before;
4. turns out you can't just replace a steel front door without replacing the jamb and everything, so we'd have to buy a pre-hung door and remove the old one to put it in;
   
5. also turns out no one in our area sells a pre-hung steel door set big enough to fit our doorway that doesn't also look like sparkly wet crap;
   
6. a two hour road trip to another town to fetch one that didn't look like sparkly wet crap was then required;
   
7. upon return with the door, it was discovered that the screws for attaching said new door were apparently made of Chinese pot-metal and were of SPECTACULARLY SHITTY QUALITY, for two of them sheered off during installation;
8. the decorative window in the door was installed improperly at the factory and is, in fact, not precisely parallel to the paneling below it by around an 8th of an inch, a fact that we did not discover until the door was well and truly in place;
9. said door was manufactured by the Masonite Corporation, who I invite, along with the National Fenestration Rating Council that certified the door, to eat a bag of dicks;
10. the deadbolt, once installed, turned out to be equally shitty to the quality of the screws and its mechanism did not stand up to even the slightest of pressure in turning the deadbolt, which resulted in a bent and no doubt Chinese pot-metal shaft within it, as well as its subsequent removal and return to the local retailer;
    
11. a new, more expensive deadbolt was purchased;
12. said new deadbolt was returned due to the fact that its purchaser (me) managed to get one with the wrong finish to match the door handle;
13. said new new deadbolt with the correct finish had to then be returned because its purchaser (me, again) managed to buy one with a keyhole on each side rather than one with a keyhole on the outside and a turning latch on the inside;
14. the returns clerk at our local Lowes failed to disagree with me when I pointed out to her that clearly I was a moron;
15. the moulding that had previously surrounded the old door is now null and void because the new door jamb does not sit as far in as the old one did, so a gap revealing the drywall beneath is clearly visible on three sides of the door;
    
16. as of this writing the door is still not fully reinstalled, though it is at least secured in place and has multiple locks present.
    

Letting the days go by, letting the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground (Well Done Broke 13)

A couple of days went by and our well babying was getting mixed results. The water was still mostly clear, but not perfect.

In order to facilitate the removal of the silty water from the well, I did things like shutting off the valve from the new tank and taking showers that pumped directly from the well. I figured this would use up any silty water in there faster, as well as clean the silt that might have built up in our pipes and bladder tank beneath the house. Then, a night later, before taking a shower in our recently mortar reinforced tub (which feels VERY solid now, thank you very much) I not only shut off the valve, but I unplugged the secondary pump entirely, which I thought would force the bladder tank to keep the water pressure up and pump directly from the well.

I was mid-way through that shower when the water shut off. Soap in my eyes, I called for the wife. She said the well had probably run dry since the shower was pulling from it and not the tank. I protested that the well should not be dry, because we'd not yet tried to fill the tank that day, so there should be plenty of water in the well. We soon realized that the reason the water had shut off was only because the pump had not come on to pull more water from the well to replace that in the bladder tank beneath the house. I'd only had the water in the pipes and the bladder tank for the shower, a very limited supply.

It did not occur to me to just ask the wife to plug in the secondary pump and run open the valve from the new tank, which would have given me plenty of water to rinse with. Instead I used the jug of water she'd saved for such emergencies. It was extra icy from resting on the tile. I squalled quite a bit and didn't get all of the soap off.

I then went and stood in the garage with my wife and my heart broke as she had a little cry over the situation. This hugely expensive endeavor was proving to be an even bigger hassle than the well had been by itself. And it didn't look like we were going to have clean water by the time our Thanksgiving guests arrived. I pointed out that the situation was not an impossible one. We just had all the problems we'd had before with the well (the silt, sulfur smell, etc.) but when those problems had previously occurred to us, they had resolved themselves within a couple of days. We just had to keep babying the well, filling it gradually and the good water would return. Once we had a tank full of it, we would just be using that and letting the system gradually replace it as needed, allowing the well itself to remain in good health. We were the ones who'd screwed up by trying to fill it too quickly.

We eventually theorized that because the secondary pump was unplugged, this interfered with the sensors that would have caused the well pump to kick on and pull more water from the well. This theory was wrong, but that was what I initially thought. And my theory was backed up by the fact that when we plugged in the secondary pump the well pump kicked on and we suddenly had water again.

After that, whenever we needed the well to kick on, either to fill the tank or just to use in the house with the tank bypassed, we just turned the breaker on and off. Saved having to go in the crawlspace to hit reset.

That was Tuesday night.

I didn't call Dave on Wednesday. I didn't want to admit we'd drained the tank after he told us not to.

On Friday neither the wife nor I could get the well to come on at all. None of the usual steps worked. No breaker, no reset buttons, no unplugging and replugging. Nada. So I called Dave. He asked all the right questions to make sure we had everything set correctly. When none of that troubleshooting turned out to be the problem. To get the pump to come on, he told me to close off the valves to the tank entirely, then go run water in the bathtub until it drained enough water pressure to trip the well pump's sensors and cause it to come on. I did this, then leaned through the crawlspace door to watch the pressure meter on the bladder tank. It was around 65 psi. I expected it to decrease, but its needle began climbing to 70 then to 75. The meter had previously sat at around 45 psi. This was wrong.

"Have you changed your filters?" Dave asked.

"Yeah. I put in a couple of 2 micron filters," I said.

That, it seemed, was the problem. Two micron filters are great at filtering out tiny tiny particles, but they also therefore have much more limited flow than the 5 micron filters. The twos had now clogged with sediment and were hampering the flow and, therefore the pressure release of the system. In fact, the filter housing by the new tank was leaking water from its pressure release valve, which should have been the first sign of pressure problems. So I changed out both filters for 5 microns, then redid the tub water step. The pressure tank sat at around 50 psi this time and decreased as the tub water flowed. The pump kicked on and suddenly we had water again.

Dave was elated that we were able to troubleshoot this successfully. He also agreed with our notion of babying the well, filling the tank little by little.

Over the weekend, we continued to slowly fill the tank, but the water we were getting from it, while mostly clear, was a smidge sulfury and full of microscopic bubbles that dissipated within a few moments of pouring it. I then decided to give the well itself a two day resting period. Instead of pumping in only 100 gallons a day, we'd just close off the reserve tank entirely and live on the well water while it recharged. We didn't do laundry. We took very quick showers and we saved buckets of the water usually wasted while waiting for hot water to hit the tub taps to flush the toilets.

On Monday morning, our 500 gallon tank sitting at under 200 gallons, we ran water until the well pump kicked on, then took a water sample from the pipe within the reserve tank itself. It was crystal clear and smelled great. We immediately filled the tank to 300 and cut if off for the day.

We wound up going into Thanksgiving with around 400 gallons at our disposal. Each day, we'd let around 100 additional gallons into the tank, which helped us keep up with the demand. With eight additional people in the house (the wife's grandma bailed at the last second and our niece Katy couldn't get out of work and had to stay back in Kentucky) including a toddler and a four-year-old, we had plenty of dishes and showers and laundry to do. By the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we had around 100 gallons in the reserve tank. After most of the guests left, we filled it to 200 and have now started the babying slow fill process again.

Long (LONG LONG) story short, though, the reserve tank is a success.

And you're a big old wuss if you don't jump in the water (a.k.a. Well Done Broke 12)

Flashback time.

Normally when our well gets low, the water becomes sulfury-smelling and occasionally a little cloudy. However, back in August, a day or so after Dave's first visit in which he bled out our well to test its depth, we experienced some rather unsettling water issues beyond just the usual hint of brimstone. One day we woke up and had gray and brackish-looking water filling our toilets. It did not stink, but instead had the visual equivalent of stench in that it looked more than vaguely greasy and its surface contained the sort of tough but tiny bubbles you might see form on the surface of water in standing pools at the edge of, say, a septic drainage ditch. Yeah. When that happened, I immediately called Dave and told him something horrible was going on. In my nightmare, somehow our septic system (which is technically down hill on the other side of our house) had somehow backflowed into the mostly-drained well and had filled it up. Unlikely, but terrifying, no?
On that day back in August, Dave assured me that the brackish water was likely the result of silt build-up on the sides of the well casing, or within the borehole of the well itself, being exposed to oxygen due to having the water drained off of it and it was now flaking off into the water below and forcing its microscopic way through our 5 micron house filter. Sure enough, a look at the sludge on our filter was enough to give me the willies all over again, and it was the one I nearly broke my coccyx replacing.

Jump to this month, three days in to our new tank system, when I awoke to find that our toilets, when flushed, were filling with gray and brackish water.

"Oh hell," I said.

I dashed to the garage where I could instantly see that the 500 gallon tank no longer shone with the clean blue tint that it had on the previous morning. Now it was darker. Grayer. Brackishier. I stood on a chair and unscrewed the foot and a half wide access plug at the top top for a look inside. It was filled with the very same ugly water that was circulating into our toilets. Shit.

I called Dave.

"Hey, buddy. What's going on?" he said.

"Well, I've got 400 gallons of green sludgy water," I said.

"Ohhhh, no," Dave said.

Dave assured me, as before, that as nasty as it looked, this was only a silt problem and it was a temporary one. The silt would settle out in a couple of days and the well would be fine one it had fully recharged. I pointed out that this might be true of the well itself, but 400 gallons of sludge water were not going to be so easy to get rid of. What could we do with it? Pour it back down the well casing and hope it filtered out next time? Dave said that was a bad idea that would probably make things worse by stirring up more silt. We shouldn't drain it at all. Sure, the water was ugly, but it was largely harmless. We weren't going to want to drink it, but it wouldn't hurt us to use it for other things until cleaner water came through. It would even settle within the tank itself, and if we wanted, he could come back and install a third filter between the tank and the house. In fact, I shouldn't even bother changing either of our current filters, because they might look nasty on the outside, but they were still good for a while. I should give him a call if things were still bad on Wednesday.

Er.

Instead of following this advice exactly, I booked it to Lowes and purchased a chub-pack of water filters. From what I could tell, 50 micron filters are apparently standard use for city water. The kind our filter uses are typically 5 micron filters, which should filter out that much more. I bought a chub pack of those, but also bought two 2 micron filters in the hope they'd be even better. These I immediately installed in the new garage filter and the one beneath the house (which also looked foul).

As I knew, the wife was not happy about the sludgy water in the tank. She had one look at it and said, "The hell we're not draining this. I can't have my family using water that looks like that." I concurred.

So we wound up draining most of it out. (I would have piped it into the rain barrels, but they're full. So I drained it into the back yard, which is at least above the well and so hopefully most of it will eventually soak back through the soil and rock to reach the subterranean water supply again.) And we gave the well a good 22 hours rest, which at approximately a 12 gallon per hour refill would be about as much time as the well should take for it to refill to its usual 250 gallon default. The water that came out was not crystal clear, but was a damn sight better than it had been. Our new plan became one of babying the well, adding only 100 gallons per day in the hope that by the time company arrives for Thanksgiving, we'll be good.

(TO BE TO BE TO BE)

I saw something gigantic, out on the water. (Well Done Broke Part 11)

After Dave's departure, the wife and I dined on soup, then watched X-Men: First Class. (Pretty decent, though I take issue with them making Beast beastly and then giving him NOTHING TO DO THAT HE COULDN'T HAVE DONE OTHERWISE, beyond just being furry.)

After the movie, I said the words I dreaded. "You wanna do the tub?"

The wife sighed, wanting to do the tub exactly as little as I did, but she said sure.

I went out to mix the mortar. From the instructions, it's scary sounding stuff. It contained silica and other elements that would supposedly burn you and cause you to develop cancer should you breath any of the dust. So I made sure to wear latex gloves and my dust filtering mask. The 60 pound bag I had bought filled our pickle bucket, so I had to shovel half of it out to make room for water. It wasn't a very exact science, but I just kept adding extra mortar to it until the whole thing came out the consistency of loose grainy peanut butter. This I shoveled into the grout bag and hauled into the house.

Because I would be in tight quarters around a bare electrical outlet, I decided to turn off the breaker for the den. After all, it wasn't as if there was any light beneath the tub that I wouldn't be bringing in the form of my head lamp. We also brought in some other flashlights and desk lamps plugged into other rooms.

I announced to the wife I was ready to begin, dropped onto the waterproof sheet we'd laid on the floor, utility knifed the tip off the grout bag and then started trying to find the best way to get the grout bag back where I needed it. It was very awkward, and quickly the backs of my latex gloves were shredded by the fiber glass shards. I was glad I'd thought to reinforce the grout bag with duct tape, cause even though the plastic beneath was a contractor-grade trash bag it would have been ribbons.

Getting the bag back where I needed it took some work, but I eventually got it there and squeezed out about half of the mortar. I couldn't see what I was doing due to the lack of light and my glasses slipping off my nose due to being pushed up by the dust mask. My wife kept asking me if the flashlight was placed correctly, but I was in stress-mode. For some reason I kept thinking I was under some kind of hard-out time crunch to get this mortar spread. As if it would harden to steel in exactly five minutes, instead of the 24 hours it really took. So with all my wriggling into the wall cavity and trying not to shred my flesh on the fiberglass, I didn't really have the capacity to entertain her questions even if they were trying to help me do what I was doing better. It was only after I started on the other side of the tub that I was able to calm down enough to realize that my carriage would not become a pumpkin at midnight. I also realized I could have had a lot more light where I needed it if only I had remembered to turn on my headlamp.

Once the mortar was spread, we set about to try and move it into position under the weak spots of the tub. This was difficult, because we had no specialized trowels that could reach that far beneath the tub, so we had to make due with squared off lengths of 2x2 wood. When I'd scraped it into what seemed like a good configuration, I tagged out with the wife and she had a go at it. It was like different writers writing drafts of a story, passing it back and forth until both feel it's good. We did the same for the other side of the tub. Then we refilled the bag and spread grout beneath the rear of the tub to help shore things up there. We knew we'd never be able to completely grout beneath all of it, but we could hopefully get it good enough. And within half an hour, we had done what we thought was the best we could given the circumstances.

By the end, my gloves were in tatters, my exposed hands drained of their moisture by the mortar and even three applications of LAY IT ON THICK moisturizing paste hadn't really improved things.

The following morning, Dave returned and worked until mid afternoon on the tank installation. The previous day, he'd said he was going to relocate our new filter system from beneath the house to the garage interior near the tank. Despite undoing all our work from weeks before, we thought was awesome. I've always wanted a filter system that I didn't have to go into the crawlspace to change the filter for. However, on this day Dave had decided he wasn't going to do that. Instead of relocating our filter, he installed a brand new one in the garage, just down stream from the spindown filter, which would do the majority of filtering for the house. The old one would still be there for backup, but it wouldn't need to be changed nearly as often because the garage filter would do most of the heavy-lifting. He said he wasn't even going to charge us for it. I imagine it was worth the expense to him not to have to go under the house and do plumbing there. In fact, I don't think Dave had any further cause to venture into the crawlspace, so this was just added bonus for all of us.

At the end of his time, the tank was in place and in working order. We turned on the breaker and it began pumping well water through the filters and into the tank until there were around 250 gallons in it--which is about all we have in our well when it's working properly. Then the control box shut it off for a four hour break--which, by our previous estimate of a 12 gallon per hour recharge, would give us 48 more gallons before shutting off again.

Dave told us how to bypass the system in case anything went wrong, which would put us back on our previous system. If we had any problems, we only had to give him a call.

By 8:30 the next morning we were not quite at 300 gallons. By 10 p.m. we were close to 400. And it was then that I noted to the wife that both the spindown filter and the new 5 micron cloth filter next to it were looking a mite dirty.

"Yeah," she said. "It's having to filter a lot more water than it normally would."

"Oh," I said.

The following morning, though, we learned that this was not entirely the case.

(TO BEEEEEE...)

They say we're mostly made of water. So how come we can't find the sea? (a.k.a. Well Done Broke part 10)

On Friday morning, after vacuuming out the underside of the tub, the wife and I made our grout bag. I used a heavy-duty contractor's garbage bag folded into what looked like a triangular piping bag shape and then reinforced with a layer of duct tape on the outside. It looked a lot like a wizard's hat, but my wife became annoyed with me when it told her she had been assigned to House Hufflepuff. We had too much going on for joking, and she always pictured herself more in Ravenclaw.

And since my morning shower had been a near trickle, I decided to at least investigate Dave's claim from earlier in the week that our filter might be at fault. I asked the wife to turn on the tap, then I switched our new filter onto its bypass setting. Instantly the water pressure returned to full force. It had been the filter.

Looking at it through the clear plastic housing, I could see that it was pretty grungy. I traded it out for a new one and our water remained at comfortable pressure. Dave had been right again.

Soon after, we gathered our mortar ingredients, including a bucket of water, cause Dave's impending arrival would likely see our water supply cut off for much of the day. Our plan was initially to do the mortaring before his arrival, so it could set up during the day. And maybe this was the better idea. But when Dave called with an ETA, I decided it would be better to wait until later. The tub would probably require both of us to work on it, and Dave would also need one of us to turn breaker switches on and off. No use fighting wars on two fronts, I said. The wife complained that if we didn't do the job now, we would manage not to get to it later. However, she was willing to defer to me on the matter.

Within an hour, Dave arrived in a truck the back of which contained a truly colossal water tank. We saw him pull in at the bottom of our driveway and the tank looked enormous from that distance. When he arrived at the top and we went out to meet him, it was far more intimidating.

"That's a big ass tank," I told him.

"Yep. A B.A.T. it is," he said.

There was some discussion about the ideal placement of the tank within the garage. I knew where I wanted it, but for a while it looked as though that wasn't going to be the most convenient place for the installation, due to it being some distance away from the existing well mechanics under the house. He wanted to place the tank in a more central location in the garage, which would mean a lot of rearranging and, also, having a tank in the middle of the back wall. Not terrible, but not ideal. The place I wanted it, however, was on the back side of our laundry room, which is built above a sub-crawlspace off of the main crawlspace that's terribly awkward to even get to, let alone enter and spend any amount of time within. I should know, I had to crawl in there to reattach the dryer hose to its outside vent. After a bit, though, Dave said he could see that we weren't going to be happy with it on the back wall and he would do what it took to put it where we needed it to be.

The readjusted plan for the big ass tank was to T into the existing water line from the well, run that through a spindown filter (which will collect the larger sediment from the well, saving the water filter from it) then the water will run into a standard water filter for the removal of smaller particles, then into the big ass water tank itself. From there the water would run via pipe to a smaller pressure pump which would send it into the house's water system via a T into the cold water input pipe for the hot water heater. A float switch within the big ass tank would automatically shut off the well pump ever time the tank filled to 500 gallons. Similarly, these systems would make the well's pump system stop pumping up water should the well run dry at any time during the process. If shut off in this manner, the pump would stay off for four hours, giving the well time to recharge around 48 gallons or so before it attempted to pump any more water into the tank. Once full, though, we would exist entirely off of the water in the big ass tank, supplemented by occasional refills from the well. In this way, we'll have a huge supply of water to use and, once full, won't ever have to tax our well. Meanwhile, if anything goes amiss, we have only to close one valve and we're back on our previous set up. Or, if we're ever without power for several days, we can run things off the 500 gallons of water pressure in the tank as well as having the ability to hook up a generator to it and still run the house. Sweet, no?

Dave and his assistant, Matt, started hooking things up. It was not a job without its problems, because the truck they had arrived with was not Dave's usual truck, which was stocked with all the parts he would need. That and some parts he did have, that arrived pre-faulty for our inconvenience, slowed things down. (Two of the pressure fit couplings came with their interior pressure fittings inserted backward, and our spin-down separator came sans filter.) Dave made the appropriate calls to arrange for replacements, but it appeared as though this would be a two day job because of the delays. Most of the initial work was to place the tank where we wanted it, and center it atop a thick layer of foam insulation. Soon enough, though, plumbing began and pump breakers were turned off and crawlspaces crawled into.

When it came to the job of crawling beneath our laundry room, I offered to be the guy to do that part of the job. From what I thought, it seemed like it would just involve me going in there and pulling pipe through a new hole in the block wall from the other side. None of the hookups to the existing plumbing would happen in there. But Dave declined the offer. I wish he hadn't, because as he drug himself across the earthen, plastic-covered floor of our crawlspace all the way over to the laundry room access gap, he gave off some pretty disturbing sounding moans of agony. It sounded like a guy with three broken ribs. The wife and I looked at each other in confusion and then sympathy for the man. Matt the assistant was having difficulty not cracking up, though, so we guessed this was normal. Eventually, though, I crawled beneath the house as well, if only so I could hear any requests for additional tools Dave might make, so he wouldn't have to crawl back for them. He spent quite a bit of time under the house, though, because even though he didn't have quite all the parts for the full tank install, he was able to wire and install the new control box for it all. By 7 p.m., he'd done all he could and left, vowing to return and finish the rest tomorrow.

(TO BE...)